
Class. 
Book_ 



JO 



CjJBiKIGHT DEPOSm 



ITALY, FRANCE 
AND BRITAIN AT WAR 



MR. WELLS HAS ALSO WRITTEN 

The Following Novels: 

Love and Mb. Lewisham 

Kipps 

Mb. Polly 

The Wheels of Chance 

The New Machiavelli 

Ann Veeonica 

Mabbiage 

ToNo Bungay 

Bealby 

The Passionate Feiends 

The Wife of Sib Isaac Habman 

The Research Magnificent 

Mb. Beitlinq Sees It Thbough 

Short Stories Collected Under the Titles 

Thibty Strange Stories 
Twelve Stories and a Dbeam 
Tales of Space and Tiaie 

The Following Fantastic and Imaginative Romances 

The Time Machine 

The Wab of the Woblds 

The Sea Lady 

The Wonderful Visit 

In the Days of the Comet 

The Sleepeb Awakes 

The Food of the Gods 

The Wab in the Aib 

The Fibst Men in the Moon 

The Woeld Set Free 

The Island of Db. Mobeau 

A Series of Books upon Social and Political Questions: 

Anticipations (1900) 

Mankind in the Making 

A Modern Utopia 

First and Last Things (Religion and Philosophy) 

The Future in America 

New Woblds fob Old 

Social Forces in England and Ameeica 

What Is Coming? 

Italy, France and Bbitain at Wab 

And Two Little Books About Children's Play Called 

Floob Games 
Little Wabs 



I 



ITALY, FRANCE 
AND BRITAIN AT WAR 



BY 

h/^g. wells 



N^m fork 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1917 






COPTEIGHT, 1917, 

By H. G. wells 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, February, 1917. 




i^ 



FEB 16 1917 



^GI,A457092 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Passing of the Effigy 1 

The "War in Italy (August, 1916) 

I. The Isonzo Front 35 

II. The Mountain War ...... 45 

III. Behind the Front . 58 

The Western War (September, 1916) 

I. Ruins 75 

II. The Grades of War 88 

III. The War Landscape 107 

IV. New Arms for Old Ones 127 

V. Tanks 153 

How People Think About the War 

I. Do They Really Think at All? . . 172 

II. The Yielding Pacifist and the Con- 
scientious Objector 184 

III. The Religious Revival 200 

IV. The Riddle of the British .... 216 
V. The Social Changes in Progress . . 231 

VI. The Ending of the War 255 



ITALY, FRANCE AND 
BRITAIN AT WAR 

THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 

§ I 

One of the minor peculiarities of this unprece- 
dented war is the Tour of the Front. After some 
months of suppressed information — in which even 
the war correspondent was discouraged to the 
point of elimination — it was discovered on both 
sides that this was a struggle in which Opinion was 
playing a larger and more important part than it 
had ever done before. This wild spreading weed 
was perhaps of decisive importance; the Germans 
at any rate were attempting to make it a cultivated 
flower. There was Opinion flowering away at 
home, feeding rankly on rumour; Opinion in neu- 
tral countries; Opinion in the enemy country; 
Opinion getting into great tangles of misunder- 
standing and incorrect valuation between the Allies. 
The confidence and courage of the enemy, the amia- 
bility and assistance of the neutral ; the zeal, sacri- 



2 ITALY, FRANCE AND BKITAIN 

fice, and serenity of the home population ; all were 
affected. The German cultivation of opinion be- 
gan long before the war; it is still the most syste- 
matic and, because of the psychological ineptitude 
of Germans, it is probably the clumsiest. The 
French Maison de la Presse is certainly the best or- 
ganisation for making things clear, counteracting 
hostile suggestion, and propagating good under- 
standing in existence. The British ofiftcial organ- 
isations are comparatively ineffective; but what is 
lacking officially is very largely made up for by 
the good will and generous efforts of the English 
and American press. An interesting monograph 
might be written upon these various attempts of 
the belligerents to get themselves and their pro- 
ceedings explained. 

Because there is perceptible in these develop- 
ments, quite over and above the desire to influence 
opinion, a very real effort to get things explained. 
It is the most interesting and curious — one might 
almost write touching — feature of these organisa- 
tions that they do not constitute a positive and de- 
fined propaganda such as the Germans maintain. 
The German propaganda is simple, because its ends 
are simple; assertions of the moral elevation and 
loveliness of Germany, of the insuperable excellen- 
cies of German Kultur, the Kaiser, the Crown 
Prince, and so forth, abuse of the " treacherous " 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 3 

English who allied themselves to the " degenerate " 
French and the " barbaric " Russians, nonsense 
about " the freedom of the seas " — the emptiest 
phrase in history — childish attempts to sow sus- 
picion between the Allies, and still more childish 
attempts to induce neutrals and simple-minded paci- 
fists of allied nationality to save the face of Ger- 
many by initiating peace negotiations. But apart 
from their steady record and reminder of German 
brutalities and German aggression, the press or- 
ganisations of the Allies have none of this definite- 
ness in their task. The aim of the national intelli- 
gence in each of the allied countries is not to exalt 
one's own nation and confuse and divide the enemy, 
but to get to a real understanding with the peoples 
and spirits of a number of different nations, an un- 
derstanding that will increase and become a fruitful 
and permanent understanding between the allied 
peoples. Neither the English, the Russians, the 
Italians nor the French, to name only the bigger 
European allies, are concerned in setting up a 
legend, as the Germans are concerned in setting up 
a legend of themselves to impose upon mankind. 
They are reality dealers in this war, and the Ger- 
mans are effigy mongers. Practically the Allies are 
saying each to one another, " Pray come to me and 
see for yourself that I am very much the human 
stuff that you are. Come and see that I am doing 



ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 



my best — and I think it is not so very bad a 
best. . . ." And with that is something else still 
more subtle, something rather in the form of, 
" And please tell me what you think of me — and 
all this." 

So we have this curious byplay of the war, and 
one day I find Mr. Nabokofif, the editor of the 
Retch, and Count Alexy Tolstoy, that writer of deli- 
cate short stories, and Mr. Chukovsky, the subtle 
critic, calling in upon me after braving the wintry 
seas to see the British fleet; Mr. Joseph Reinach 
follows them presently upon the same errand, and 
then appear photographs of Mr. Arnold Bennett 
wading in the trenches of Flanders, Mr. Noyes be- 
comes discreetly indiscreet about what he has seen 
among the submarines, and Mr. Hugh Walpole 
catches things from Mr. Stephen Graham in the 
Dark Forest of Russia. All this is quite over and 
above such writing of facts at first hand as Mr. Pat- 
rick McGill and a dozen other real experiencing 
soldiers, — not to mention the soldiers' letters Mr. 
James Milne has collected, or the unforgettable and 
immortal Prisoner of War of Mr. Arthur Green — 
or such admirable war correspondents' work as Mr. 
Philip Gibbs or Mr. Washburne has done. Some of 
us writers — I can answer for one — have made our 
Tour of the Fronts with a very understandable diffi- 
dence. For my own part I did not want to go. I 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 5 

evaded a suggestion that I should go in 1915. I 
travel badly, I speak French aijd Italian with in- 
credible atrocity, and am an extreme Pacifist. I 
hate soldiering. And also I did not want to write 
anything " under instruction." It is largely owing 
to a certain stiffness in the composition of General 
Delme-Eadcliffe, the British Military Attache at 
the Italian Comando Supremo, that I was at last 
dislodged upon this journey. General Delme-Rad- 
cliffe is resolved that Italy shall not feel neglected 
by the refusal of the invitation of the Comando Su- 
premo by any one who from the perspective of Italy 
may seem to be a representative of British opinion. 
If Herbert Spencer had been alive General Rad- 
cliffe would have certainly made him come, travel- 
ling-hammock, ear clips and all — and I am not 
above confessing that I wish that Herbert Spencer 
was alive — for this purpose. I found Udine warm 
and gay with memories of Mr. Belloc, Lord North- 
cliffe, Mr. Sidney Low, Colonel Repington and Dr. 
Conan Doyle, and anticipating the arrival of Mr. 
Harold Cox. So we pass, mostly in automobiles 
that bump tremendously over war roads, a cloud of 
witnesses each testifying after his manner. What- 
ever else has happened we have all been photo- 
graphed with invincible patience and resolution 
under the direction of Colonel Barberich in a sunny 
little court in Udine. 



6 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

My own manner of testifying must be to tell what 
I have seen and what I have thought during this 
extraordinary experience. It has been my natural 
disposition to see this war as something purposeful 
and epic, as something fundamentally as splendid 
as it is great, as an epoch, as " the War that will 
end War " — but of that last, more anon. I do not 
think I am alone in this inclination to a dramatic 
and logical interpretation. The caricatures in the 
French shops show civilisation (and particularly 
Marianne) in conflict with a huge and hugely 
wicked Hindenburg Ogre. Well, I come back from 
this tour with something not quite so simple as that. 
If I were to be tied down to one word for my impres- 
sion of this war, I should say that this war is 
Queer. It is not like anything in a really waking 
world, but like something in a dream. It hasn't 
exactly that clearness of light against darkness or 
of good against ill. But it has the quality of whole- 
some instinct struggling under a nightmare. The 
world is not really awake. This vague appeal for 
explanations to all sorts of people, this desire to 
exhibit the business, to get something in the way of 
elucidation at present missing, is extraordinarily 
suggestive of the efforts of the mind to wake up that 
will sometimes occur at a dream crisis. My mem- 
ory of this tour I have just made is full of puzzled- 
looking men. I have seen thousands of poilus sit- 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 7 

ting about in cafes, by tbe roadside, in tents, in 
trenches, thoughtful. I have seen Alpini sitting 
restfully and staring with speculative eyes across 
the mountain gulfs towards unseen and unaccount- 
able enemies. I have seen trainloads of wounded 
staring out of the ambulance train windows as we 
passed. I have seen these dim intimations of ques- 
tioning reflection in the strangest juxtapositions ; in 
Malasgay soldiers resting for a spell among the big 
shells they were hoisting into trucks for the front, 
in a couple of khaki-clad Maoris sitting upon the 
step of a horse-van in Amiens station. It is al- 
ways the same expression one catches, rather weary, 
rather sullen, inturned. The shoulders droop. 
The very outline is a note of interrogation. They 
look up as the privileged tourist of the front, in the 
big automobile or the reserved compartment, with 
his ofi&cer or so in charge, passes — importantly. 
One meets a pair of eyes that seems to say : " per- 
haps you understand. , . . 

"In which case . . .?" 

It is a part, I think, of this disposition to investi- 
gate that makes every one collect " specimens " of 
the war. Everywhere the souvenir forces itself 
upon the attention. The homecoming permission- 
aire brings with him invariably a considerable 
weight of broken objects, bits of shell, cartridge 
clips, helmets ; it is a peripatetic museum. It is as 



8 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

if he hoped for a clue. It is almost impossible, I 
have found, to escape these pieces in evidence. I 
am the least collecting of men, but I have brought 
home Italian cartridges, Austrian cartridges, the 
fuse of an Austrian shell, a broken Italian bayonet, 
and a note that is worth half a franc within the con- 
fines of Amiens. But a large heavy piece of ex- 
ploded shell that had been thrust very urgently 
upon mf attention upon the Carso I contrived to 
lose during the temporary confusion of our party 
by the arrival and explosion of another prospective 
souvenir in our close proximity. And ti^o really 
very large and almost complete specimens of some 
species of Ammonites unknown to me, from the hills 
to the east of the Adige, partially wrapped in a back 
number of the Corriere deJla Sera, that were pressed 
upon me by a friendly officer, were unfortunately 
lost on the line between Verona and Milan through 
the gross negligence of a railway porter. But I 
doubt if they would have thrown any very conclusive 
light upon the war. 



§ 2 

I avow myself an extreme Pacifist. I am against 
the man who first takes up the weapon. I carry 
my pacifism far beyond the position of that ambigu- 
ous little group of British and foreign sentimen- 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 9 

talists who pretend so amusingly to be socialists in 
the Labour Leader, whose conception of foreign 
policy is to give Germany now a peace that would 
be no more than a breathing time for a fresh out- 
rage upon civilisation, and who would even make 
heroes of the crazy young assassins of the Dublin 
crime. I do not understand those people. I do 
not merely want to stop this war. I want to nail 
down war in its coffin. Modem war is an intoler- 
able thing. It is not a thing to trifle with in this 
U.D.C. way, it is a thing to end for ever. I have 
always hated it, so far that is, as my imagination 
had enabled me to realise it; and now that I have 
been seeing it, sometime quite closely for a full 
month, I hate it more than ever. I never imagined 
a quarter of its waste, its boredom, its futility, its 
desolation. It is merely a destructive and disper- 
sive instead of a constructive and accumulative in- 
dustrialism. It is a gigantic, dusty, muddy, weedy, 
bloodstained silliness. It is the plain duty of every 
man to give his life and all that he has if by so do- 
ing he may help to end it. I hate Germany, which 
has thrust this experience upon mankind, as I hate 
some horrible infectious disease. The new war, the 
war on the modern level, is her invention and her 
crime. I perceive that on our side and in its broad 
outlines, this war is nothing more than a gigantic 
and heroic effort in sanitary engineering ; an effort 



10 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

to remove German militarism from the life and 
regions it has invaded, and to bank it in and dis- 
credit and enfeeble it so that never more will it re- 
peat its present preposterous and horrible efforts. 
All human affairs and all great affairs have their 
reservations and their complications, but that is 
the broad outline of the business as it has impressed 
itself on my mind and as I find it conceived in the 
mind of the average man of the reading class among 
the allied peoples, and as I find it understood in the 
judgment of honest and intelligent neutral ob- 
servers. 

It is my unshakeable belief that essentially the 
Allies fight for a permanent world peace, that 
primarily they do not make war but resist war, that 
has reconciled me to this not very congenial expe- 
rience of touring as a spectator all agog to see, 
through the war zones. At any rate there w^as never 
any risk of my playing Balaam and blessing the 
enemy. This war was tragedy and sacrifice for 
most of the w^orld, for the Germans it is simply the 
catastrophic outcome of fifty years of elaborate in- 
tellectual foolery. Militarism, Welt Politik, and 
here we are ! What else could have happened, with 
Michael and his infernal War Machine in the very 
centre of Europe, but this tremendous disaster? 

It is a disaster. It may be a necessary disaster ; 
it may teach a lesson that could be learnt in no 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 11 

other way; but for all that, I insist, it remains 
waste, disorder, disaster. 

There is a disposition, I know, in myself as well 
as in others, to wriggle away from this verity, to 
find so much good in the collapse that has come to 
the mad direction of Europe for the past half cen- 
tury as to make it on the whole almost a beneficial 
thing. But at most I can find in it no greater good 
than the good of a nightmare that awakens a sleeper 
in a dangerous place to a realisation of the extreme 
danger of his sleep. Better had he been awake — 
or never there. In Venetia Captain Pirelli, whose 
task it was to keep me out of mischief in the war 
zone, was insistent upon the way in which all 
Venetia was being opened up by the new military 
roads ; there has been scarcely a new road made in 
Venetia since Napoleon drove his straight, poplar- 
bordered highways through the land. M. Josepli 
Reinach, who was my companion upon the French 
front, was equally impressed by the stirring up and 
exchange of ideas in the villages due to the move- 
ment of the war. Charles Lamb's story of the dis- 
covery of roast pork comes into one's head with an 
effect of repartee. More than ideas are exchanged 
in the war zone, and it is doubtful how far the sani- 
tary precautions of the military authorities avails 
against a considerable propaganda of disease. A 
more serious argument for the good of war is that 



12 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

it evokes heroic qualities in common people. There 
is no denying that it has brought out almost in- 
credible quantities of courage, devotion, and indi- 
vidual romance that did not show in the suffocating 
peace time that preceded the war. The reckless and 
beautiful zeal of the women in the British and 
French munition factories, for example, the gaiety 
and fearlessness of the common soldiers everywhere ; 
these things have always been there — like cham- 
pagne sleeping in bottles in a cellar. But was 
there any need to throw a bomb into the cellar? 

I am reminded of a story, or rather of the idea for 
a story that I think I must have read in that curi- 
ous collection of fantasies and observations, Haw- 
thorne's l<[ote Book. It was to be the story of a 
man who found life dull and his circumstances al- 
together mediocre. He had loved his wife, but now 
after all she seemed to be a very ordinary human 
being. He had begun life with high hopes — and 
life was commonplace. He was to grow fretful and 
restless. His discontent was to lead to some action, 
some irrevocable action ; but upon the nature of that 
action I do not think the 'Note Book was very clear. 
It was to carry him to the burning of his house. 
It was to carry him in such a manner that he was to 
forget his wife. Then, when it was too late, he was 
to see her at an upper window, stripped and firelit, 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 13 

a glorious thing of light and loveliness and tragic 
intensity. . . . 

The elementary tales of the world are very few, 
and Hawthorne's story and Lamb's story are, after 
all, only variations upon the same theme. But can 
we poor human beings never realise our quality 
without destruction? 



§ 3 

One of the larger singularities of the great war is 
its failure to produce great and imposing personali- 
ties, mighty leaders, Napoleons, Csesars. I would 
indeed make that the essential thing in my reckon- 
ing up of the war. It is a drama without a hero ; 
with countless incidental heroes no doubt, but no 
star part. Even the Germans, with a national pre- 
disposition for hero-cults and living still in an at- 
mosphere of Victorian humbug, can produce noth- 
ing better than that timber image, Hindenburg. 

It is not that the war has failed to produce heroes 
so much as that it has produced heroism in a tor- 
rent. The great man of this war is the common 
man. It becomes ridiculous to pick out particular 
names. There are too many true stories of splendid 
acts in the past two years ever to be properly set 
down. The V.C.'s and the palms do but indicate 



14 ITALY, FKANCE AND BEITAIN 

samples. One would need an encyclopaedia, a row 
of volumes, of the gloriousness of human impulses. 
The acts of the small men in this war dwarf all 
the pretensions of the Great Man. Imperatively 
these multitudinous heroes forbid the setting up of 
effigies. When I was a young man I imitated Swift 
and posed for cynicism ; I will confess that now at 
fifty and greatly helped by this war, I have fallen in 
love with mankind. 

But if I had to pick out a single figure to stand 
for the finest quality of the Allies' war, I should I 
think choose the figure of General Joffre. He is 
something new in history. He is leadership with- 
out vulgar ambition. He is the extreme antithesis 
to the Imperial boomster of Berlin. He is as it 
were the ordinary commonsense of men, incarnate. 
He is the antithesis of the effigy. 

By great good luck I was able to see him. I was 
delayed in Paris on my way to Italy, and my friend 
Captain Millet arranged for a visit to the French 
front at Soissons and put me in charge of Lieu- 
tenant de Tessin, whom I had met in England study- 
ing British social questions long before this war. 
Afterwards Lieutenant de Tessin took me to the 
great hotel — it still proclaims "Restaurant" in 
big black letters on the garden wall — which 
shelters the General Headquarters of France, and 
here I was able to see and talk to Generals Pelle 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 15 

and Castelnau as well as to General Joffre. They 
are three very remarkable and very different men. 
They have at least one thing in common ; it is clear 
that not one of them has spent ten minutes in all his 
life in thinking of himself as a Personage or Great 
Man. They all have the effect of being active and 
able men doing an extremely complicated and diffi- 
cult but extremely interesting job to the very best of 
their ability. With me they had all one quality 
in common. They thought I was interested in what 
they were doing, and they were quite prepared to 
treat me as an intelligent man of a different sort, 
and to show me as much as I could understand. . . . 

Let me confess that de Tessin had had to persuade 
me to go to Headquarters. Partly that was because 
I didn't want to use up even ten minutes of the time 
of the French commanders, but much more was it 
because I have a dread of Personages. 

There is something about these encounters with 
personages — as if one was dealing with an effigy, 
with something tremendous put up to be seen. As 
one approaches they become remoter; great unsus- 
pected crevasses are discovered. Across these gulfs 
one makes ineffective gestures. They do not meet 
you, they pose at you enormously. Sometimes 
there is something more terrible than dignity ; there 
is condescension. They are affable. I had but re- 
cently had an encounter with an imported Colonial 



16 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

statesman, who was being advertised like a soap as 
the coming saviour of England. I was curious to 
meet him. I wanted to talk to him about all sorts 
of things that would have been profoundly interest- 
ing, as for example his impressions of the Anglican 
bishops. But I met a hoarding, I met a thing like 
a mask, something surrounded by touts, that was 
dully trying — as we say in London — to " come it " 
over me. He said he had heard of me. He had 
read Kipps. I intimated that though I had written 
Kipps I had continued to exist — but he did not see 
the point of that. I said certain things to him 
about the difference in complexity between political 
life in Great Britain and the colonies, that he was 
manifestly totally incapable of understanding. 
But one could as soon have talked with one of the 
statesmen at Madame Tussaud's. An antiquated 
figure. 

The effect of these French commanders upon me 
was quite different from my encounter with that 
last belated adventurer in the eflflgy line. I felt in- 
deed that I was a rather idle and flimsy person com- 
ing into the presence of a tremendously compact and 
busy person, but I had none of that unpleasant sen- 
sation of a conventional role, of being expected to 
play the minute worshipper in the presence of the 
Great Image. I was so moved by the common hu- 
manity of them all that in each case I broke away 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 17 

from the discreet interpretations of de Tessin and 
talked to them directly in the strange dialect which 
I have inadvertently made for myself out of French, 
a disemvowelled speech of epicene substantives and 
verbs of incalculable moods and temperaments, 
^^ Entente Cordiale." They talked back as if we 
had met in a club. General Pelle pulled my leg 
very gaily with some quotations from an article I 
had written upon the conclusion of the war. I 
think he found my accent and my idioms very re- 
freshing. I had committed myself to a statement 
that Bloch has been justified in his theory that 
under modern conditions the defensive wins. There 
were excellent reasons, and General Pelle pointed 
them out, for doubting the applicability of this to 
the present war. 

Both he and General Castelnau were anxious that 
I should see a French offensive sector as well as 
Soissons. Then I should understand. And since 
then I have returned from Italy and I have seen and 
I do understand. The Allied offensive was win- 
ning; that is to say, it was inflicting far greater 
losses than it experienced; it was steadily beating 
the spirit out of the German army and shoving it 
back towards Germany. Only peace can, I believe, 
prevent the western war ending in Germany. And 
it is the Frenchmen mainly who have worked out 
how to do it. 



18 ITALY, FKANCE AND BEITAIN 

But of that I will write later. My present con- 
cern is with General Joffre as the antithesis of the 
Effigy. The effigy, 

"Thou Prince of Peace, 
Thou God of War," 

as Mr. Sylvester Viereck called him, prances on a 
great horse, wears a Wagnerian cloak, sits on 
thrones and talks of shining armour and "unser 
Gott." All Germany gloats over his Jovian domes- 
ticities; when I was last in Berlin the postcard 
shops were full of photographs of a sort of proces- 
sion of himself and his sons, all with long straight 
noses and side-long eyes. It is all dreadfully old- 
fashioned. General Joffre sits in a pleasant little 
sitting-room in a very ordinary little villa conven- 
iently close to Headquarters. He sits among furni- 
ture that has no quality of pose at all, that is neither 
magnificent nor ostentatiously simple and hardy. 
He has dark, rather sleepy eyes under light eye- 
lashes, eyes that glance shyly and a little askance 
at his interlocutor and then, as he talks, away — as 
if he did not want to be preoccupied by your atten- 
tion. He has a broad, rather broadly modelled face, 
a soft voice, the sort of persuasive reasoning voice 
that many Scotchmen have. I had a feeling that 
if he were to talk English he would do so with a 
Scotch accent. Perhaps somewhere I have met a 



THE PASSING OP THE EFFIGY 19 

Scotchman of his type. He sat sideways to his 
table as a man might sit for a gossip in a cafe. 

He is physically a big man, and in my memory he 
grows bigger and bigger. He sits now in my mem- 
ory in a room like the rooms that any decent 
people might occupy, like that vague room that is 
the background of so many good portraits, a great 
blue-coated figure with a soft voice and rather tired 
eyes, explaining very simply and clearly the diffi- 
culties that this vulgar imperialism of Germany, 
seizing upon modern science and modern appli- 
ances, has created for France and the spirit of man- 
kind. 

He talked chiefly of the strangeness of this con- 
founded war. It was exactly like a sanitary en- 
gineer speaking of the unexpected difficulties of 
some particularly nasty inundation. He made lit- 
tle stiff horizontal gestures of his hands. First one 
had to build a dam and stop the rush of it, so ; then 
one had to organise the push that would send it 
back. He explained the organisation of the push. 
They had got an organisation now that was working 
out most satisfactorily. Had I seen a sector? I 
had seen the sector of Soissons. Yes, but that was 
not now an offensive sector. I must see an of- 
fensive sector; see the whole method. Lieutenant 
de Tessin must see that that was arranged. . . . 

Neither he nor his two colleagues spoke of the 



20 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

Germans with either hostility or humanity. Ger- 
many for them is manifestly merely an objection- 
able Thing. It is not a nation, not a people, but a 
nuisance. One has to build up this great counter 
thrust bigger and stronger until they go back. The 
war must end in Germany. The French generals 
have no such delusions about German science or 
foresight or capacity as dominates the smart dinner 
chatter of England. One knows so well that de- 
testable type of English folly, and its voice of de- 
spair : " They plan everything. They foresee 
everything." This paralysing Germanophobia is 
not common among the French. The war, the 
French generals said, might take — well, it cer- 
tainly looked like taking longer than the winter. 
Next summer perhaps. Probably, if nothing un- 
foreseen occurred, before a full year has passed the 
job might be done. Were any surprises in store? 
They didn't seem to think it was probable that the 
Germans had any surprises in store. . . . The Ger- 
mans are not an inventive people ; they are merely a 
thorough people. One never knew for certain. 

Is any greater contrast possible than between so 
implacable, patient, reasonable — and above all 
things capable — a being as General Joffre and the 
rhetorician of Potsdam, with his talk of German 
Might, of Hammer Blows and Hacking through? 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 21 

Can there be any doubt of the ultimate issue be- 
tween them? 

There are stories that sound pleasantly true to me 
about General Joff re's ambitions after the war. He 
is tired; then he will be very tired. He will, he 
declares, spend his first free summer in making a 
tour of the waterways of France in a barge. So I 
hope it may be. One imagines him as sitting 
quietly on the crumpled remains of the last and 
tawdriest of Imperial traditions, with a fishing line 
in the placid water and a large buff umbrella over- 
head, the good ordinary man who does whatever is 
given to him to do — as well as he can. The power 
that has taken the great effigy of German imperial- 
ism by the throat is something very composite and 
complex, but if we personify it at all it is something 
more like General Joffre than any other single 
human figure I can think of or imagine. 

If I were to set a frontispiece to a book about this 
War I would make General Joffre the frontispiece. 

§ 4 

As we swung back along the dusty road to Paris 
at a pace of fifty miles an hour and upwards, driven 
by a helmeted driver with an aquiline profile fit to 
go upon a coin, whose merits were a little flawed by 



22 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

a childish and dangerous ambition to run over every 
cat he saw upon the road, I talked to de Tessin 
about this big blue-coated figure of Joffre, which is 
not so much a figure as a great generalisation of cer- 
tain hitherto rather obscured French qualities, and 
of the impression he had made upon me. And from 
that I went on to talk about the Super Man, for this 
encounter had suddenly crystallised out a set of 
realisations that had been for some time latent in 
my mind. 

How much of what follows I said to de Tessin at 
the time I do not clearly remember, but this is what 
I had in mind. 

The idea of the superman is an idea that has been 
developed by various people ignorant of biology and 
unaccustomed to biological ways of thinking. It 
is an obvious idea that follows in the course of half 
an hour or so upon one's realisation of the signifi- 
cance of Darwinism. If man has evolved from 
something lower or at least something different, 
he must now be evolving onward into something 
sur-human. The species in the future will be dif- 
ferent from the species of the past. So far at least 
our Nietzsches and Shaws and so on went right. 

But being ignorant of the elementary biological 
proposition that modification of a species means 
really a secular change in its average, they jumped 
to a conclusion — to which the late Lord Salisbury 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 23 

also jumped years ago at a very memorable British 
Association meeting — that a species is modified by 
the sudden appearance of eccentric individuals here 
and there in the general mass who interbreed — 
preferentially. Helped by a streak of antic egotism 
in themselves, they conceived of the superman as 
a posturing personage, misunderstood by the vulgar, 
fantastic, wonderful. But the antic Personage, the 
thing I have called the Effigy, is not new but old, 
the oldest thing in history, the departing thing. It 
depends not upon the advance of the species but 
upon the uncritical hero-worship of the crowd. 
You may see the monster drawn twenty times the 
size of common men upon the oldest monuments of 
Egypt and Assyria. The true superman comes not 
as the tremendous personal entry of a star, but in 
the less dramatic form of a general increase of good- 
will and skill and commonsense. A species rises 
not by thrusting up peaks but by brimming up as 
a flood does. The coming of the superman means 
not an epidemic of personages but the disappear- 
ance of the Personage in the universal ascent. 
That is the point overlooked by the megalomaniac 
school of Nietzsche and Shaw. 

And it is the peculiarity of this war, it is the most 
reassuring evidence that a great increase in general 
ability and critical ability has been going on 
throughout the last century, that no isolated great 



24 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

personages have emerged. Never has there been so 
much ability, invention, inspiration, leadership ; but 
the very abundance of good qualities has prevented 
our focusing upon those of any one individual. We 
all play our part in the realisation of God's sanity 
in the world, but, as the strange, dramatic end of 
Lord Kitchener has served to remind us, there is no 
single individual of all the allied nations whose 
death can materially affect the great destinies of 
this war. 

In the last few years I have developed a re- 
ligious belief that has become now to me as real as 
any commonplace fact. I think that mankind is 
still, as it were, collectively dreaming and hardly 
more awakened to reality than a very young child. 
It has these dreams that we express by the flags of 
nationalities and by strange loyalties and by irra- 
tional creeds and ceremonies, and its dreams at 
times become such nightmares as this war. But 
the time draws near when mankind will awake and 
the dreams will fade away, and then there will be no 
nationality in all the world but humanity, and no 
king, no emperor, nor leader but the one God of 
mankind. This is my faith. I am as certain of this 
as I was in 1900 that men would presently fly. To 
me it is as if it must be so. 

So that to me this extraordinary refusal of the 
allied nations under conditions that have always 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 25 

hitherto produced a Great Man to produce any- 
thing of the sort, anything that can be used as an 
effigy and carried about for the crowd to follow, is a 
fact of extreme significance and encouragement. 
It seems to me that the twilight of the half gods 
must have come, that we have reached the end of the 
age when men needed a Personal Figure about 
which they could rally. The Kaiser is perhaps the 
last of that long series of crowned and cloaked and 
semi-divine personages which has included Caesar 
and Alexander and Napoleon the First — and 
Third. In the light of the new time we see the em- 
peror God for the guy he is. In the August of 1914 
he set himself up to be the paramount Lord of the 
World, and it will seem to the historian to come, 
who will know our dates so well and our feelings, 
our fatigues and efforts so little, it will seem a short 
period from that day to this, when the great figure 
already sways and staggers towards the bonfire. 



§ 5 

I had the experience of meeting a contemporary 
king upon this journey. He was the first king I had 
ever met. The Potsdam figure — with perhaps 
some local exceptions behind the gold coast — is, 
with its collection of uniforms and its pomps and 
splendours, the purest survival of the old tradition 



26 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

of divine monarchy now that the Emperor at Pekin 
has followed the Shogun into the shadows. The 
modern type of king shows a disposition to intimate 
at the outset that he cannot help it, and to justify 
or at any rate utilise his exceptional position by 
sound hard work. It is an age of working kings, 
with the manners of private gentlemen. The King 
of Italy for example is far more accessible than was 
the late Pierpont Morgan or the late Cecil Rhodes, 
and he seems to keep a smaller court. 

I went to see him from Udine. He occupied a 
moderate-sized country villa about half an hour by 
automobile from headquarters. I went over with 
General Radcliffe; we drove through the gates of 
the villa past a single sentinel in an ordinary in- 
fantry uniform, up to the door of the house, and the 
number of guards, servants, court attendants, of- 
ficials, secretaries, ministers and the like that I saw 
in that house were — I counted very carefully — 
four. Downstairs were three people, a tall soldier 
of the bodyguard in grey, an A.D.C., Captain Mor- 
eno, and Colonel Matteoli, the minister of the 
household. I went upstairs to a drawing-room of 
much the same easy and generalised character as the 
one in which I had met General Joff re a few days 
before. I gave my hat to a second bodyguard, and 
as I did so a pleasantly smiling man appeared at 
the door of the study whom I thought at first must 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 27 

be some minister in attendance. I did not recog- 
nise him instantly because on the stamps and coins 
he is always in profile. He began to talk in excel- 
lent English about my journey, and I replied, and so 
talking we went into the study from which he had 
emerged. Then I realised I was talking to the 
king. 

Addicted as I am to the cinematograph, in which 
the standard of study furniture is particularly rich 
and high, I found something very cooling and simple 
and refreshing in the sight of the king's study furni- 
ture. He sat down with me at a little useful writ- 
ing-table, and after asking me w^hat I had seen in 
Italy and hearing what I had seen and w^hat I was 
to see, he went on talking, very good talk indeed. 

I suppose I did a little exceed the established tra- 
dition of courts by asking several questions and try- 
ing to get him to talk upon certain points upon 
which I was curious, but I perceived that he had had 
to carry on at least so much of the regal tradition 
as to control the conversation. He was, however, 
entirely un-posed. His talk reminded me some- 
how of Maurice Baring's books ; it had just the same 
quick, positive understanding. And he had just the 
same detachment from the war as the French gen- 
erals. He spoke of it — as one might speak of an 
inundation. And of its difficulties and perplexities. 

Here on the Adriatic side there were political en- 



28 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

tanglements that by comparison made our western 
after-the-war problems plain sailing. He talked of 
the game of spellicans among the Balkan nation- 
alities. How was that difficulty to be met? In 
Macedonia there were Turkish villages that were 
Christian and Bulgarians that were Moslem. 
There were families that changed the termination 
of their names from ski to off as Serbian or Bul- 
garian prevailed. I remarked that that showed a 
certain passion for peace, and that much of the mis- 
chief might be due to the propaganda of the great 
powers. I have a prejudice against that blessed 
Whig " principle of nationality," but the King of 
Italy was not to be drawn into any statement about 
that. He left the question with his admission of its 
extreme complexity. 

He went on to talk of the strange contrasts of 
war, of such things as the indifference of the birds 
to gunfire and desolation. One day on the Carso 
he had been near the newly captured Austrian 
trenches, and suddenly from amidst a scattered 
mass of Austrian bodies a quail had risen. That 
had struck him as odd, and so too had the sight of a 
pack of cards and a wine flask on some newly made 
graves. The ordinary life was a very ohstinate 
thing. . . . 

He talked of the courage of common men. He 
was astonished at the quickness with which they 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 29 

came to disregard shrapnel. And they were so 
quietly enduring when they were wounded. He had 
seen a lot of the wounded, and he had expected much 
groaning and crying out. But unless a man is hit 
in the head and goes mad he does not groan or 
scream! They are just brave. If you ask them 
how they feel it is always one of two things : either 
they say quietly that they are very bad or else they 
say there is nothing the matter. . . . 

He spoke as if these were mere chance observa- 
tions, but every one tells me that nearly every day 
the king is at the front and often under fire. He 
has taken more risks in a week than the Potsdam 
War Lord has taken since the war began. He keeps 
himself acutely informed upon every aspect of the 
war. He was a little inclined to fatalism, he con- 
fessed. There were two stories current of two fami- 
lies of four sons, in each three had been killed and in 
each there was an attempt to put the fourth son in a 
place of comparative safety. In one case a general 
took the fourth son in as an attendant and embarked 
upon a ship that was immediately torpedoed ; in the 
other the fourth son was killed by accident while he 
was helping to carry dinner in a rest camp. From 
those stories we came to the question whether the 
uneducated Italians were more superstitious than 
the uneducated English ; the king thought they were 
much less so. That struck me as a novel idea. But 



30 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 



then he thought that English rural people believe in 
witches and fairies. 

I have given enough of this talk to show the 
quality of this king of the new dispensation. It 
was, you see, the sort of easy talk one might hear 
from fine-minded people anywhere. When we had 
done talking he came to the door of the study with 
me and shook hands and went back to his desk — 
with that gesture of return to work which is very 
familiar and sympathetic to a writer, and with no 
gesture of regality at all. 

Just to complete this impression let me repeat a 
pleasant story about this king and our Prince of 
Wales, who recently visited the Italian front. The 
Prince is a source of anxiety on these visits ; he has a 
very strong and very creditable desire to share the 
ordinary risks of war. He is keenly interested, and 
unobtrusively bent upon getting as near the fighting 
line as possible. But the King of Italy was firm 
upon keeping him out of anything more than the 
most incidental danger. " We don't want any his- 
torical incidents here," he said. I think that might 
well become an historical phrase. For the life of 
the Effigy is a series of historical incidents. 

§ 6 
Manifestly one might continue to multiply por- 
traits of fine people working upon this great task of 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 31 

breaking and ending the German aggression, the 
German legend, the German effigy, and the effigy 
business generally ; the thesis being that the Allies 
have no effigy. One might fill a thick volume with 
pictures of men up the scale and down working 
loyally and devotedly upon the war, to make this 
point clear that the essential king and the essential 
loyalty of our side is the commonsense of mankind. 
There comes into my head as a picture at the 
other extreme of this series, a memory of certain 
trenches I visited on my last day in France. They 
were trenches on an offensive front ; they were not 
those architectural triumphs, those homes from, 
home, that grow to perfection upon the less active 
sections of the great line. They had been first made 
by men who had run rapidly forward with spade 
and rifle, stooping as they ran, who had dropped 
into the craters of big shells, who had organised 
these chiefly at night and dug the steep ditches side- 
ways to join up into continuous trenches. They 
were now pushing forward saps into No Man's 
Land, linking them across, and so continually creep- 
ing nearer to the enemy and a practicable jumping- 
off place for an attack. (It has been made since; 
the village at which I peeped was in our hands a 
week later. ) These trenches were dug into a sort of 
yellowish sandy clay ; the dug-outs were mere holes 
in the earth that fell in upon the clumsy ; hardly any 



32 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

timber had been got up to the line ; a storm might 
flood them at any time a couple of feet deep and 
begin to wash in the sides. Overnight they had 
been " strafed " and there had been a number of 
casualties; there were smashed rifles about and a 
smashed-up machine gun emplacement, and the men 
were dog-tired and many of them sleeping like logs, 
half buried in clay. Some slept on the firing steps. 
As one went along one became aware ever and again 
of two or three pairs of clay -yellow feet sticking out 
of a clay hole, and peering down one saw the shapes 
of men like rudely modelled earthen images of sol- 
diers, motionless in the cave. 

I came round the corner upon a youngster with an 
intelligent face and steady eyes sitting up on the 
firing step, awake and thinking. We looked at one 
another. There are moments when mind leaps to 
mind. It is natural for the man in the trenches 
suddenly confronted by so rare a beast as a middle- 
aged civilian with an enquiring expression, to feel 
himself something of a spectacle and something gen- 
eralised. It is natural for the civilian to look 
rather in the vein of saying, " Well, how do you 
take it? " As I pushed past him we nodded slightly 
with an effect of mutual understanding. And we 
said with our nods just exactly what General Joffre 
said with his horizontal gestures of the hand and 
what the King of Italy conveyed by his friendly 



THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY 33 

manner; we said to each other that here was the 
trouble those Germans had brought upon us and 
here was the task that had to be done. 

Our guide to these trenches was a short, stocky 
young man, a cob ; with a rifle and a tight belt and 
projecting skirts and helmet, a queer little figure 
that, had you seen it in a picture a year or so before 
the war, you would most certainly have pronounced 
Chinese. He belonged to a Northumbrian bat- 
talion; it does not matter exactly which. As we 
returned from this front line, trudging along the 
winding path through the barbed wire tangles be- 
fore the smashed and captured German trench that 
had been taken a fortnight before, I fell behind my 
guardian captain and had a brief conversation with 
this individual. He was a lad in the early twenties, 
weather-bit and with bloodshot eyes. He was, he 
told me, a miner. I asked my stock question in 
such cases, whether he would go back to the old 
work after the war. He said he would, and then 
added — with the events of overnight in his mind : 
" If A'hm looky." 

Followed a little silence. Then I tried my second 
stock remark for such cases. One does not talk to 
soldiers at the front in this war of Glory or the 
" Empire on which the sun never sets " or " the 
meteor flag of England " or of King and Country or 
any of those fine old headline things. On the deso- 



34 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 



late path that winds about amidst the shell craters 
and the fragments and the red-rusted wire, with the 
silken shiver of passing shells in the air and the blue 
of the lower sky continually breaking out into eddy- 
ing white puffs, it is wonderful how taw^dry such 
panoplies of the eflSgy appear. We know that we 
and our allies are upon a greater, graver, more 
fundamental business than that sort of thing now. 
We are very near the walking point. 
" Well," I said, " it's got to be done." 
" Aye," he said, easing the strap of his rifle a lit- 
tle ; " it's got to be done." 



THE WAR IN ITALY 

August, 1916 

I 
THE ISONZO FRONT 



My first impressions of the Italian war centre upon 
Udine. So far I had had only a visit to Soissons on 
an exceptionally quiet day and the sound of a Zep- 
pelin one night in Essex for all my experience of 
actual warfare. But my bedroom at the British 
mission in Udine roused perhaps extravagant ex- 
pectations. There were holes in the plaster ceiling 
and wall, betraying splintered laths, holes that had 
been caused by a bomb that had burst and killed 
several people in the little square outside. Such 
excitements seem to be things of the past now in 
Udine. Udine keeps itself dark nowadays, and the 
Austrian sea-planes, which come raiding the Italian 
coast country at night very much in the same aim- 
less, casually malignant way in which the Zeppelins 
raid England, apparently because there is nothing 
else for them to do, find it easier to locate Venice. 

35 



36 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

My earlier rides in Venetia began always with the 
level roads of the plain, roads frequently edged by 
water courses, with plentiful willows beside the 
road, vines and fields of Indian corn and suchlike 
lush crops. Always quite soon one came to some 
old Austrian boundary posts; almost everywhere 
the Italians are fighting upon what is technically 
enemy territory, but nowhere does it seem a whit 
less Italian than the plain of Lombardy. When 
at last I motored away from Udine to the northern 
mountain front I passed through Campo-Formio 
and saw the white-faced inn at which Napoleon dis- 
membered the ancient republic of Venice and bar- 
tered away this essential part of Italy into foreign 
control. It just gravitates back now — as though 
there had been no Napoleon. 

And upon the roads and beside them was the enor- 
mous equipment of a modern army advancing. 
Everywhere I saw new roads being made, railways 
pushed up, vast store dumps, hospitals ; everywhere 
the villages swarmed with grey soldiers ; everywhere 
our automobile was threading its way and taking 
astonishing risks among interminable processions 
of motor lorries, strings of ambulances or of mule- 
carts, waggons with timber, waggons with wire, 
waggons with men's gear, waggons with casks, wag- 
gons discreetly veiled, columns of infantry, cavalry, 
batteries en route. Every waggon that goes up full 



THE ISONZO FEONT 37 

comes back empty, and many wounded were coming 
down and prisoners and troops returning to rest. 
Goritzia had been taken a week or so before my ar- 
rival ; the Isonzo had been crossed and the Austrians 
driven back across the Carso for several miles; all 
the resources of Italy seemed to be crowding up to 
make good these gains and gather strength for the 
next thrust. The roads under all this traffic re- 
mained wonderful; gangs of men were everywhere 
repairing the first onset of wear, and Italy is the 
most fortunate land in the world for road metal; 
her mountains are solid road metal, and in this 
Venetian plain you need but to scrape through a 
yard of soil to find gravel. 

One travelled through a choking dust under the 
blue sky, and above the steady incessant dusty suc- 
cession of lorry, lorry, lorry, lorry that passed one 
by, one saw, looking up, the tree tops, house roofs, 
or the solid Venetian campanile of this or that way- 
side village. Once as we were coming out of the 
great grey portals of that beautiful old relic of a 
former school of fortification, Palmanova, the traffic 
became suddenly bright yellow, and for a kilometre 
or so we were passing nothing but Sicilian mule- 
carts loaded with hay. These carts seem as strange 
among the grey shapes of modern war transport as a 
Chinese mandarin in painted silk would be. They 
are the most individual of things, all two-wheeled, 



38 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

all bright yellow and the same size it is true, but 
upon each there are the gayest of little paintings, 
such paintings as one sees in England at times upon 
an ice-cream barrow. Sometimes the picture will 
present a scriptural subject, sometimes a scene of 
opera, sometimes a dream landscape or a trophy of 
fruits or flowers, and the harness — now much out 
of repair — is studded with brass. Again and 
again I have passed strings of these gay carts; all 
Sicily must be swept of them. 

Through the dust I came to Aquileia, which is 
now an old cathedral, built upon the remains of a 
very early basilica, standing in a space in a scat- 
tered village. But across this dusty space there 
was carried the head of the upstart Maximin who 
murdered Alexander Severus, and later Aquileia 
brought Attila near to despair. Our party 
alighted ; we inspected a very old mosaic floor which 
has been uncovered since the Austrian retreat. The 
Austrian priests have gone too, and their Italian 
successors are already tracing out a score of Roman 
traces that it was the Austrian custom to minimise. 
Captain Pirelli refreshed my historical memories; 
it was rather like leaving a card on Gibbon en route 
for contemporary history. 

By devious routes I went on to certain batteries 
of big guns which had played their part in hammer- 
ing the Austrian left above Monfalcone across an 



THE ISONZO FRONT 39 

arm of the Adriatic, and which were now under or- 
ders to shift and move up closer. The battery was 
the most unobtrusive of batteries; its one desire 
seemed to be to appear a simple piece of woodland 
in the eye of God and the aeroplane. I went about 
the network of railways and paths under the trees 
that a modern battery requires, and came presently 
upon a great gun that even at the first glance seemed 
a little less carefully hidden than its fellows. Then 
I saw that it was a most ingenious dummy made of a 
tree and logs and so forth. It was in the emplace- 
ment of a real gun that had been located ; it had its 
painted sandbags about it just the same, and it felt 
itself so entirely a part of the battery that whenever 
its companions fired it burnt a flash and kicked up a 
dust. It was an excellent example of the great art 
of Camouflage which this war has developed. 

I went on through the wood to a shady observa- 
tion post high in a tree, into which I clambered with 
my guide. I was able from this position to get a 
very good idea of the general lie of the Italian east- 
ern front. I was in the delta of the Isonzo. Di- 
rectly in front of me were some marshes and the ex- 
treme tip of the Adriatic Sea, at the head of which 
was Monfalcone, now in Italian hands. Behind 
Monfalcone ran the red ridge of the Carso, of which 
the Italians had just captured the eastern half. Be- 
hind this again rose the mountains to the east of the 



40 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 



Isonzo which the Austrians still held. The Isonzo 
came towards me from out of the mountains, in a 
great westward curve. Fifteen or sixteen miles 
away where it emerged from the mountains lay the 
pleasant and prosperous town of Goritzia, and at 
the westward point of the great curve was Sagrado 
with its broken bridge. The battle of Goritzia was 
really not fought at Goritzia at all. What hap- 
pened was the brilliant and bloody storming of 
Mounts Podgora and Sabotino on the western side 
of the river above Goritzia, and simultaneously a 
crossing at Sagrado below Goritzia and a magnifi- 
cent rush up to the plateau and across the plateau 
of the Carso. Goritzia itself was not organised for 
defence, and the Austrians were so surprised by the 
rapid storm of the mountains to the northwest of it 
and of the Carso to the southeast, that they made 
no fight in the town itself. 

As a consequence when I visited it I found it very 
little injured — compared, that is, with such other 
towns as have been fought through. Here and 
there the front of a house has been knocked in by 
an Austrian shell, or a lamp post prostrated. But 
the road bridge had suffered a good deal ; its iron 
parapet was twisted about by shell bursts and inter- 
woven with young trees and big boughs designed to 
screen the passerby from the observation of the Aus- 
trian gunners upon Monte Santo. Here and there 



THE ISONZO FRONT 41 

were huge holes through which one could look down 
upon the blue trickles of water in the stony river 
bed far below. The driver of our automobile dis- 
played what seemed to me an extreme confidence in 
the margins of these gaps, but his confidence was 
justified. At Sagrado the bridge had been much 
more completely demolished; no effort had been 
made to restore the horizontal roadway, but one 
crossed by a sort of timber switchback that followed 
the ups and downs of the ruins. 

It is not in these places that one must look for 
the real destruction of modern war. The real fight 
on the left of Goritzia went through the village of 
Lucinico up the hill of Podgora. Lucinico is noth- 
ing more than a heap of grey stones ; except for a bit 
of the church wall and the gable end of a house one 
cannot even speak of it as ruins. But in one place 
among the rubble I saw the splintered top and a leg 
of a grand piano. Podgora hill, which was no 
doubt once neatly terraced and cultivated, is like a 
scrap of landscape from some airless, treeless 
planet. Still more desolate was the scene upon the 
Carso to the right (south) of Goritzia. Both San 
Martino and Doberdo are destroyed beyond the 
limits of ruination. The Carso itself is a waterless 
upland with but a few bushy trees ; it must always 
have been a desolate region, but now it is an inde- 
scribable wilderness of shell craters, smashed-up 



42 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

Austrian trenches, splintered timber, old iron, rags 
and that rusty thorny vileness of man's invention, 
worse than all the thorns and thickets of nature, 
barbed wire. There are no dead visible; the 
wounded have been cleared away; but about the 
trenches and particularly near some of the dug-outs 
there was a faint repulsive smell. . . . 

Yet into this wilderness the Italians are now 
thrusting a sort of order. The German is a won- 
derful worker; they say on the Anglo-French front 
that he makes trenches by way of resting, but I 
doubt if he can touch the Italian at certain forms of 
toil. All the w^ay up to San Martino and beyond, 
swarms of workmen were making one of those care- 
fully graded roads that the Italians make better 
than any other people. Other swarms were laying 
waterpipes. For upon the Carso there are neither 
roads nor water, and before the Italians can thrust 
further both must be brought up to the front. 

As we approached San Martino an Austrian aero- 
plane made its presence felt overhead by dropping a 
bomb among the tents of some workmen, in a little 
scrubby wood on the hillside near at hand. One 
heard the report and turned to see the fragments 
flying and the dust. Probably they got some one. 
And then, after a little pause, the encampment be- 
gan to spew out men; here, there and everywhere 
they appeared among the tents, running like rabbits 



THE ISONZO FRONT 43 

at evening-time, down the hill. Very soon after and 
probably in connection with this signal Austrian 
shells began to come over. They do not use shrap- 
nel because the rocky soil of Italy makes that un- 
necessary. They fire a sort of shell that goes bang 
and releases a cloud of smoke overhead, and then 
drops a parcel of high explosive that bursts on the 
ground. The ground leaps into red dust and smoke. 
But these things are now to be seen on the cinema. 
Forthwith the men working on the road about us 
begin to down tools and make for the shelter 
trenches, a long procession going at a steady but 
resolute walk. Then like a blow in the chest came 
the bang of a big Italian gun somewhere close at 
hand. . . . 

Along about four thousand miles of the various 
fronts this sort of thing was going on that morn- 
ing. ... 

§ 2 

This Carso front is the practicable offensive front 
of Italy. From the left wing on the Isonzo along 
the Alpine boundary round to the Swiss boundary 
there is mountain warfare like nothing else in the 
world, it is warfare that pushes the boundary back- 
ward, but it is mountain warfare that will not, for 
so long a period that the war will be over first, hold 
out any hopeful prospects of offensive movements on 



44 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

a large scale against Austria or Germany. It is a 
short distance, as the crow flies, from Eovereto to 
Munich, but not as the big gun travels. The Ital- 
ians, therefore, as their contribution to the common 
effort, are thrusting rather eastwardly towards the 
line of the Julian Alps through Carinthia and Car- 
niola. From my observation post in the tree near 
Monfalcone I saw Trieste away along the coast to 
my right. It looked scarcely as distant as Folke- 
stone from Dungeness. The Italian advanced line 
is indeed scarcely ten miles from Trieste. But the 
Italians are not, I think, going to Trieste just yet. 
That is not the real game now. They are playing 
loyally with the Allies for the complete defeat of the 
Central Powers, and that is to be achieved striking 
home into Austria. Meanwhile there is no sense in 
knocking Trieste to pieces, or using Italians instead 
of Austrian soldiers to garrison it. 



II 

THE MOUNTAIN WAR 

§ 1 

The mountain warfare of Italy is extraordinarily 
unlike that upon any other front. From the Isonzo 
to the Swiss frontier we are dealing with high moun- 
tains, cut by deep valleys between which there is 
usually no practicable lateral communications. 
Each advance must have the nature of an unsup- 
ported shove along a narrow channel, until the 
whole mountain system, that is, is won, and the at- 
tack can begin to deploy in front of the passes. 
Geographically Austria has the advantage. She 
had the gentler slope of the mountain chains while 
Italy has the steep side, and the foresight of old 
treaties has given her deep bites into what is nat- 
urally Italian territory ; she is far nearer the Italian 
plain than Italy is near any practicable fighting 
ground for large forces ; particularly is this the case 
in the region of the Adige valley and Lake Garda. 

The legitimate war, so to speak, in this region is a 
mountaineering war. The typical position is 
roughly as follows. The Austrians occupy valley 

45 



46 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

A which opens northward ; the Italians occupy val- 
ley B which opens southward. The fight is for the 
crest between A and B. The side that wins that 
crest gains the power of looking down into, firing 
into and outflanking the positions in the enemy 
valley. In most cases it is the Italians now who 
are pressing, and if the reader will examine a map 
of the front and compare it with the official reports 
he will soon realise that almost everywhere the 
Italians are up to the head of the southward val- 
leys and working over the crests so as to press down 
upon the Austrian valleys. But in the Trentino 
the Austrians are still well over the crest on the 
southward slopes. When I was in Italy they still 
held Rovereto. 

Now it cannot be said that under modern condi- 
tions mountains favour either the offensive or the 
defensive. But they certainly make operations far 
more deliberate than upon a level. An engineered 
road or railway in an Alpine valley is the most 
vulnerable of things; its curves and viaducts may 
be practically demolished by shell fire or swept by 
shrapnel, although you hold the entire valley ex- 
cept for one vantage point. All the mountains 
round about a valley must be won before that val- 
ley is safe for the transport of an advance. But 
on the other hand a surprise capture of some single 
mountain crest and the hoisting of one gun into 



THE MOUNTAIN WAR 47 

position there may block the retreat of guns and 
material from a great series of positions. Moun- 
tain surfaces are extraordinarily various and subtle. 
You may understand Picardy upon a map, but 
mountain warfare is three-dimensional. A strug- 
gle may go on for weeks or months consisting of ap- 
parently separate and incidental skirmishes, and 
then suddenly a whole valley organisation may 
crumble away in retreat or disaster. Italy is gnaw- 
ing into the Trentino day by day, and particularly 
round by her right wing. At no time shall I be 
surprised to see a sudden lunge forward on that 
front, and hear of a tale of guns and prisoners. 
This will not mean that she has made a sudden at- 
tack, but that some system of Austrian positions 
has collapsed under her continual pressure. 

Such briefly is the idea of the mountain struggle. 
Its realities, I should imagine, are among the 
strangest and most picturesque in all this tremen- 
dous world conflict. I know nothing of the war 
in the east, of course, but there are things here that 
must be hard to beat. Happily they will soon get 
justice done to them by an abler pen than mine. I 
hear that Kipling is to follow me upon this round ; 
nothing can be imagined more congenial to his ex- 
traordinary power of vivid rendering than this 
struggle against cliffs, avalanches, frost and the 
Austrian. 



48 ITALY, FRANCE AND BEITAIN 

To go the Italian round needs, among other 
things, a good head. Everywhere it has been neces- 
sary to make roads where hitherto there have been 
only mule tracks or no tracks at all ; the roads are 
often still in the making, and the automobile of the 
war tourist skirts precipices and takes hairpin 
bends upon tracks of loose metal not an inch too 
broad for the operation, or it floats for a moment 
over the dizzy edge while a train of mule transport 
blunders by. The unruly imagination of man's 
heart (which is " only evil continually ") speculates 
upon what would be the consequences of one good 
bump from the wheel of a mule-cart. Down below, 
the trees that one sees through a wisp of cloud look 
far too small and spiky and scattered to hold out 
much hope for a fallen man of letters. And at the 
high positions they are too used to the vertical life 
to understand the secret feelings of the visitor from 
the horizontal. General Bompiani, whose writings 
are well known to all English students of military 
matters, showed me the Gibraltar he is making of a 
great mountain system east of the Adige. 

" Let me show you," he said, and flung himself 
on to the edge of the precipice into exactly the po- 
sition of a lady riding side-saddle. " You will flnd 
it more comfortable to sit down." 

But anxious as I am abroad not to discredit my 
country by unseemly exhibitions I felt unequal to 



THE MOUNTAIN WAR 49 

su€h gymnastics without a proper rehearsal at a 
lower level. I seated myself carefully a yard (per- 
haps it was a couple of yards) from the edge, ad- 
vanced on my trousers without dignity to the verge, 
and so wdth an effort thrust my legs over to dangle 
in the crystalline air. 

" That," proceeded General Bompiani, pointing 
with a giddy flourish of his riding whip, " is Monte 
Tomba." 

I swayed and half extended my hand towards 
him. But he was still there — sitting, so to speak, 
on the half of himself. ... I was astonished that 
he did not disappear abruptly during his exposi- 
tion. . . . 

§ 2 

The fighting in the Dolomites has been perhaps 
the most wonderful of all these separate mountain 
campaigns. I went up by automobile as far as the 
clambering new road goes up the flanks of Tofana 
No. 2; thence for a time by mule along the flank 
of Tofana No. 1, and thence on foot to the vestiges 
of the famous Castelletto. 

The aspect of these mountains is particularly 
grim and wicked; they are worn old mountains, 
they tower overhead in enormous vertical cliffs of 
sallow grey, with the square jointings and occa- 
sional clefts and gullies, their summits are toothed 



50 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

and jagged ; the path ascends and passes round the 
side of the mountain upon loose screes, which de- 
scend steeply to a lower wall of precipices. In the 
distance rise other harsh and desolate looking 
mountain masses, with shining occasional scars of 
old snow. Far below is a bleak valley of stunted 
pine trees through which passes the road of the 
Dolomites. 

As I ascended the upper track two bandaged men 
were coming down on led mules. It was mid 
August, and they were suffering from frost bite. 
Across the great gap between the summits a minute 
traveller with some provisions was going up by wire 
to some post upon the crest. For everywhere upon 
the icy pinnacles are observation posts directing the 
fire of the big guns on the slopes below, or ma- 
chine-gun stations, or little garrisons that sit and 
wait through the bleak days. Often they have no 
link with the world below but a precipitous climb 
or a " teleferic " wire. Snow and frost may cut 
them off absolutely for weeks from the rest of man- 
kind. The sick and wounded must begin their jour- 
ney down to help and comfort in a giddy basket that 
swings down to the head of the mule track below. 

Originally all these crests were in Austrian 
hands; they were stormed by the Alpini under al- 
most incredible conditions. For fifteen days, for 
example, they fought their way up these screes on 



THE MOUNTAIN WAR 51 

the flanks of Tofana No. 2 to the ultimate crags, 
making perhaps a hundred metres of ascent each 
day, hiding under rocks and in holes in the day- 
light and receiving fresh provisions and ammuni- 
tion and advancing by night. They were subjected 
to rifle flre, machine-gun fire and bombs of a pecu- 
liar sort, big iron balls of the size of a football filled 
with explosive that were just flung down the steep. 
They dodged flares and star shells. At one place 
they went up a chimney that would be far beyond 
the climbing powers of any but a very active man. 
It must have been like storming the skies. The 
dead and wounded rolled away often into inaccessi- 
ble ravines. Stray skeletons, rags of uniform, frag- 
ments of weapons, will add to the climbing interest 
of these gaunt masses for many years to come. In 
this manner it was that Tofana No. 2 w^as taken. 

Now the Italians are organising this prize, and I 
saw winding up far above me on the steep grey 
slope a multitudinous string of little things that 
looked like black ants, each carrying a small bright 
yellow egg. They were mules bearing bulks of tim- 
ber. . . . 

But one position held out invincibly ; this was the 
Castelletto, a great natural fortress of rock stand- 
ing out at an angle of the mountain in such a posi- 
tion that it commanded the Italian communications 
(the Dolomite road) in the valley below, and ren- 



52 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

dered all their positions uncomfortable and inse- 
cure. This obnoxious post was practically inac- 
cessible either from above or below, and it barred 
the Italians even from looking into the Val Trave- 
nanzes which it defended. It was, in fact, an im- 
pregnable position. It was an impregnable posi- 
tion, and against it was pitted the invincible fifth 
group of the Alpini. It was the old problem of the 
irresistible force in conflict with the immovable 
post. And the outcome has been the biggest mili- 
tary mine in all history. 

The business began in January, 1916, with sur- 
veys of the rock in question. The work of survey- 
ing for excavations, never a very simple one, be- 
comes much more difficult when the site is occupied 
by hostile persons with machine guns. In March, 
as the winter's snows abated, the boring machinery 
began to arrive, by mule as far as possible and then 
by hand. Altogether about half a kilometre of gal- 
lery had to be made to the mine chamber, and mean- 
while the gelatine was coming up load by load and 
resting first here, then there, in discreetly chosen 
positions. There were at the last thirty-five tons 
of it in the inner chamber. And while the boring 
machines bored and the work went on. Lieutenant 
Malvezzi was carefully working out the problem of 
" il massimo effetto dirompente " and deciding ex- 
actly how to pack and explode his little hoard. On 



THE MOUNTAIN WAR 53 

the eleventh of July, at 3.30, as he rejoices to state 
in his official report, " the mine responded per- 
fectly both in respect of the calculations made and 
of the practical effects," that is to say, the Aus- 
trians were largely missing and the Italians were 
in possession of the crater of the Castelletto and 
looking down the Val Travenanzes from which they 
had been barred for so long. Within a month 
things had been so tidied up, and secured by fur- 
ther excavations and sandbags against hostile fire, 
that even a middle-aged English writer, extremely 
fagged and hot and breathless, could enjoy the 
same privilege. All this, you, must understand, 
had gone on at a level to which the ordinary tourist 
rarely climbs, in a rarefied, chest-tightening atmos- 
phere, with wisps of cloud floating in the clear air 
below and club-huts close at hand. . . . 

Among these mountains avalanches are fre- 
quent; and they come down regardless of human 
strategy. In many cases the trenches cross ava- 
lanche tracks; they and the men in them are peri- 
odically swept away and periodically replaced. 
They are positions that must be held ; if the Italians 
wall not face such sacrifices, the Austrians will. 
Avalanches and frost bite have slain and disabled 
their thousands; they have accounted perhaps for 
as many Italians in this austere and giddy cam- 
paign as the Austrians. . . . 



54 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

§ 3 

It seems to be part of the stern resolve of Fate 
that this, the greatest of wars, shall be the least 
glorious ; it is manifestly being decided not by vic- 
tories but by blunders. It is indeed a history of 
colossal stupidities. Among the most decisive of 
these blunders, second only perhaps to the blunder 
of the Verdun attack and far outshining the wild 
raid of the British towards Bagdad, was the blun- 
der of the Trentino offensive. It does not need 
the equipment of a military expert, it demands 
only quite ordinary knowledge and average intelli- 
gence, to realise the folly of that Austrian adven- 
ture. There is some justification for a claim that 
the decisive battle of the war was fought upon the 
soil of Italy. There is still more justification for 
saying that it might have been. 

There was only one good point about the Aus- 
trian thrust. No one could have foretold it. And 
it did so completely surprise the Italians as to 
catch them without any prepared line of positions 
in their rear. On the very eve of the big Russian 
offensive, the Austrians thrust eighteen divisions 
hard at the Trentino frontier. The Italian posts 
were then in Austrian territory; they held on the 
left wing and the right, but they were driven in by 
sheer weight of men and guns in the centre, they 



THE MOUNTAIN WAR 55 

lost guns and prisoners because of that difficulty of 
mountain retreats to which I have alluded, and the 
Austrians pouring through reached not indeed the 
plain of Venetia, but to the upland valleys immedi- 
ately above it, to Asiago and Arsiero. They prob- 
ably saw the Venetian plain through gax)S in the 
hills, but they were still separated from it even at 
Arsiero by what are mountains to an English eye, 
mountains as high as SnoAvdon, But the Italians 
of such beautiful old places as Vicenza, Marostica 
and Bassano could watch the Austrian shells burst- 
ing on the last line of hills above the plain, and I 
have no doubt they felt extremely uneasy. 

As one motors through these ripe and beautiful 
towns and through the rich valleys that link them 
— it is a smiling land abounding in old castles and 
villas, Vicenza is a rich museum of Palladio's archi- 
tecture and Bassano is full of irreplaceable painted 
buildings — one feels that the thing was a narrow 
escape, but from the military point of view it was 
merely an insane escapade. The Austrians had 
behind them — and some way behind them — one 
little strangulated railway and no good pass road ; 
their right was held at Pasubio, their left was simi- 
larly bent back. In front of them was between 
twice and three times their number of first class 
troops, with an unlimited equipment. If they had 
surmounted that last mountain crest they would 



56 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

have come down to almost certain destruction in 
the plain. They could never have got back. For 
a time it is said that General Cadorna considered 
that possibility. From the point of view of purely 
military considerations, the Trentino offensive 
should perhaps have ended in the capitulation of 
Vicenza. 

I will confess I am glad it did not do so. This 
tour of the fronts has made me very sad and weary 
with a succession of ruins. I can bear to see no 
more ruins unless they are the ruins of Dussel- 
dorf, Cologne, Berlin, or such-like modern German 
city. Anxious as I am to be a systematic Philis- 
tine, to express my preference for Marinetti over 
the Florentine British and generally to antagonise 
aesthetic prigs, I rejoiced over that sunlit land as 
one might rejoice over a child saved from beasts. 

On the hills beyond Schio I walked out through 
the embrasure of a big gun in a rock gallery, and 
saw the highest points upon the hillside to which 
the Austrian infantry clambered in their futile last 
attacks. Below me were the ruins of Arsiero and 
Velo d'Astico recovered, and across the broad val- 
ley rose Monte Cimone with the Italian trenches 
upon its crest and the Austrians a little below to 
the north. A very considerable bombardment was 
going on and it reverberated finely. (It is only 
among mountains that one hears anything that one 



THE MOUNTAIN WAE 57 

can call the thunder of guns. The heaviest bom- 
bardments I heard in France sounded merely like 
Brock's benefit on a much louder scale, and disap- 
pointed me extremely.) As I sat and listened to 
this uproar and watched the shells burst on Cimone 
and far away up the valley over Castelletto above 
Pedescala, Captain Pirelli pointed out the position 
of the Austrian frontier. I doubt if English peo- 
ple realise that the utmost depth to which this 
great Trentino offensive, which exhausted Austria, 
wasted the flower of the Hungarian army and led 
directly to the Galician disasters and the interven- 
tion of Rumania, penetrated into Italian territory 
was about six miles. 



Ill 

BEHIND THE FRONT 



I HAVE a peculiar affection for Verona and cer- 
tain things in Verona. Italians must forgive us 
English this little streak of impertinent proprie- 
torship in the beautiful things of their abundant 
land. It is quite open to them to revenge them- 
selves by professing a tenderness for Liverpool or 
Leeds. It was, for instance, with a peculiar and 
personal indignation that I saw where an Austrian 
air bomb had killed five-and-thirty people in the 
Piazza Erbe. Somehow in that jolly old place, a 
place that has very much of the quality of a very 
pretty and cheerful little old woman, it seemed ex- 
ceptionally an outrage. And I made a special pil- 
grimage to see how it was with that monument of 
Can Grande, the equestrian Scaliger with the side- 
long grin, for whom I confess a ridiculous admira- 
tion. Can Grande, I rejoice to say, has retired into 
a case of brickwork, surmounted by a steep roof of 
thick iron plates ; no aeroplane exists to carry bomb 

58 



BEHIND THE FRONT 59 

enough to smash that covering ; there he will smile 
securely in the darkness until peace comes again. 
All over Venetia the Austrian seaplanes are 
making the same sort of idiot raid on lighted places 
that the Zeppelins have been making over England. 
These raids do no effective military work. What 
conceivable military advantage can there be in 
dropping bombs into a marketing crowd? It is a 
sort of anti-Teutonic propaganda by the Central 
Powers to which they seem to have been incited by 
their own evil genius. It is as if they could con- 
vince us that there is an essential malignity in Ger- 
mans, that until the German powers are stamped 
down into the mud they will continue to do evil 
things. All the Allies have borne the thrusting 
and boasting of Germany with exemplary patience 
for half a century; England gave her Heligoland 
and stood out of the way of her colonial expansion, 
Italy was a happy hunting ground for her business 
enterprise, France had come near resignation on 
the score of Alsace-Lorraine. And then over and 
above the great outrage of the war come these in- 
cessant mean-spirited atrocities. A great and sim- 
ple wickedness it is possible to forgive; the war 
itself, had it been fought greatly by Austria and 
Germany, would have made no such deep and en- 
during breach as these silly, futile assassinations 
have done between the Austro-Germans and the 



60 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

rest of the civilised world. One great misdeed is 
a thing understandable and forgivable ; what grows 
upon the consciousness of the world is the per- 
suasion that here we fight not a national sin but a 
national insanity; that we dare not leave the Ger- 
man the power to attack other nations any more 
for ever. . . . 

Venice has suffered particularly from this ape- 
like impulse to hurt and terrorise enemy non-com- 
batants. Venice has indeed suffered from this war 
far more than any other town in Italy. Her trade 
has largely ceased ; she has no visitors. I woke up 
on my way to Udine and found my train at Venice 
with an hour to spare; after much examining and 
stamping of my passport I was allowed outside the 
station wicket to get coffee in the refreshment room 
and a glimpse of a very sad and silent Grand Canal. 
There was nothing doing ; a black despondent rem- 
nant of the old crowd of gondolas browsed dreamily 
against the quay. There was no competition for a 
potential passenger; a small boy walked down the 
quay to stare at me the better. The empty palaces 
seemed to be sleeping in the morning sunshine be- 
cause it was not worth while to wake up. . . . 

§ 2 
Except in the case of Venice, the war does not 
seem as yet to have made nearly such a mark upon 



BEHIND THE FRONT 61 

life in Italy as it has in England or provincial 
France. People speak of Italy as a poor country, 
but that is from a banker's point of view. In some 
respects she is the richest country on earth, and in 
the matter of staying power I should think she is 
better off than any other belligerent. She pro- 
duces food in abundance everywhere; her women 
are agricultural workers, so that the interruption 
of food production by the war has been less serious 
in Italy than in any other part of Europe. In 
peace time, she has constantly exported labour ; the 
Italian worker has been a seasonal emigrant to 
America, north and south, to Switzerland, Ger- 
many and the south of France. The cessation of 
this emigration has given her great reserves of man 
power, so that she has carried on her admirable 
campaign with less interference with her normal 
economic life than any other power. The first per- 
son I spoke to upon the platform at Modane was a 
British officer engaged in forwarding Italian pota- 
toes to the British front in France. Afterwards on 
my return, when a little passport irregularity kept 
me for half a day in Modane, I went for a walk with 
him along the winding pass road that goes down 
into France. " You see hundreds and hundreds of 
new Fiat cars," he remarked, '' along here — going 
up to the French front." 

But there is a return trade. Near Paris I saw 



62 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

scores of thousands of shells piled high to go to 
Italy. 

I doubt if English people fully realise either the 
economic sturdiness or the political courage of 
their Italian ally. Italy is not merely fighting a 
first-class war in first-class fashion but she is doing 
a big, dangerous, generous and far-sighted thing in 
fighting at all. France and England were obliged 
to fight; the necessity was as plain as daylight. 
The participation of Italy demanded a remoter wis- 
dom. In the long run she would have been swal- 
lowed up economically and politically by the Ger- 
man if she had not fought ; but that was not a thing 
staring her plainly in the face as the danger, insult 
and challenge stared France and England in the 
face. What did stare her in the face was not 
merely a considerable military and political risk, 
but the rupture of very close financial and com- 
mercial ties. I found thoughtful men talking 
everywhere I have been in Italy of two things, of 
the Jugo-Slav riddle and of the question of post 
war finance. So far as the former matter goes I 
think the Italians are set upon the righteous solu- 
tion of all such riddles, they are possessed by an 
intelligent generosity. They are clearly set upon 
deserving Jugo-Slav friendship; they understand 
the plain necessity of open and friendly routes to- 
wards Roumania. It was an Italian who set out 



BEHIND THE FRONT . 63 

to explain to me that Fiume must be at least a free 
port ; it would be wrong and foolish to cut the trade 
of Hungary off from the Mediterranean. But the 
banking puzzle is a more intricate and puzzling 
matter altogether than the possibility of trouble 
between Italian and Jugo-Slav. 

I write of these things with the simplicity of an 
angel, but without an angelic detachment. Here 
are questions into which one does not so much rush 
as get reluctantly pushed. Currency and banking 
are dry distasteful questions, but it is clear that 
they are too much in the hands of mystery -mongers ; 
it is as much the duty of any one who talks and 
writes of affairs, it is as much the duty of every 
sane adult, to bring his possibly poor and unsuit- 
able wits to bear upon these things, as it is for him 
to vote or enlist or pay his taxes. Behind the sim- 
ple ostensible spectacle of Italy recovering the un- 
redeemed Italy of the Trentino and East Venetia, 
goes on another drama. Has Italy been sinking 
into something rather hard to define called "eco- 
nomic slavery"? Is she or is she not escaping 
from that magical servitude? Before this ques- 
tion has been under discussion for a minute comes 
a name — for a time I was really quite unable to 
decide whether it is the name of the villain in the 
piece or of the maligned heroine, or a secret so- 
ciety or a gold mine, or a pestilence or a delusion 



64 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

— the name of the Banca Commerciale Italiana. 
Banking in a country undergoing so rapid and 
vigorous an economic development as Italy is very 
different from the banking we simple English peo- 
ple know of at home. Banking in England, like 
land-owning, has hitherto been a sort of hold up. 
There were always borrowers, there were always 
tenants, and all that had to be done was to refuse, 
obstruct.^ delay and worry the helpless borrower or 
would-be tenant until the maximum of security 
and profit was obtained. I have never borrowed 
but I have built, and I know something of the ex- 
treme hauteur of property in England towards a 
man who wants to do anything with land, and with 
money I gather the case is just the same. But in 
Italy, which already possessed a sunny prosperity 
of its own upon mediaeval lines, the banker has had 
to be suggestive and persuasive, sympathetic and 
helpful. These are unaccustomed attitudes for 
British capital. The field has been far more at- 
tractive to the German banker, who is less of a 
proudly impassive usurer and more of a partner, 
who demands less than absolute security because he 
investigates more industriously and intelligently. 
This great bank, the Banca Commerciale Italiana, 
is a bank of the German type : to begin with, it was 
certainly dominated by German directors; it was 
a bank of stimulation, and its activities interweave 



BEHIND THE FRONT 65 

now into the whole fabric of Italian commercial 
life. But it has already liberated itself from Ger- 
man influence, and the bulk of its capital is Italian. 
Nevertheless I found discussion ranging about 
firstly what the Banca Commerciale essentially 
was, secondly what it might hecome, thirdly what 
it might do, and fourthly what, if anything, had to 
be done to it. 

It is a novelty to an English mind to find bank- 
ing thus mixed up with politics, but it is not a nov- 
elty in Italy. All over Venetia there are agricul- 
tural banks which are said to be " clerical." I 
grappled with this mystery. " How are they cleri- 
cal?" I asked Captain Pirelli. "Do they lend 
money on bad security to clerical voters, and on no 
terms whatever to anti-clericals? " He was quite 
of my way of thinking. '" Pecunia non olet," he 
said ; " I have never yet smelt a clerical fifty lira 
note." . . . But on the other hand Italy is very 
close to Germany; she wants easy money for de- 
velopment, cheap coal, a market for various prod- 
acts. The case against the Germans, this case in 
which the Banca Commerciale Italiana appears, I 
am convinced, unjustly as a suspect, is that they 
have turned this natural and proper interchange 
with Italy into the acquisition of German power. 
That they have not been merely easy traders, but 
patriotic agents. It is alleged that they used their 



66 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

early " pull " in Italian banking to favour German 
enterprises and German political influence against 
the development of native Italian business; that 
their merchants are not bona-fide individuals but 
members of a nationalist conspiracy to gain eco- 
nomic controls. The German is a patriotic mono- 
maniac. He is not a man but a limb, the worship- 
per of a national eflfigy, the digit of an insanely 
proud and greedy Germania, and here are the natu- 
ral consequences. 

The case of the individual Italian compactly is 
this. "We do not like Austrians and Germans. 
These Imperialisms look always over the Alps. 
Whatever increases German influence here threat- 
ens Italian life. The German is a German first 
and a human being afterwards. . . . But on the 
other hand England seems commercially indiffer- 
ent to us and France has been economically hos- 
tile. . . ." 

" After all," I said presently after reflection, " in 
that matter of Pecunia non olet: there used to be 
fusses about European loans in China. And one 
of the favourite themes of British fiction and 
drama before the war was the unfortunate position 
of the girl who accepted a loan from the wicked 
man to pay her debts at bridge." 

"Italy," said Captain Pirelli, "isn't a girl. 
And she hasn't been playing bridge." 



BEHIND THE FRONT 67 

I incline on the whole to his point of view. 
Money is facile cosmopolitan stuff. I think that 
any bank that settled down in Italy is going to be 
slowly and steadily naturalised Italian, it will be- 
come more and more Italian until it is wholly 
Italian. I would trust Italy to make and keep the 
Banca Commerciale Italiana, Italian. I believe 
the Italian brain is a better brain than the German 
article. But still I heard people talking of the 
implicated organisation as if it were engaged in the 
most insidious duplicities. " Wait for only a year 
or so after the war," said one English authority 
to me, " and the mask will be off and it will be 
frankly a ' Deutsche Bank ' again." They assure 
me that then German enterprises will be favoured 
again, Italian and Allied enterprises blockaded and 
embarrassed, the good understanding of Italians 
and English poisoned, entirely through this organ- 
isation. ... 

The reasonable uncommercial man would like to 
reject all this last sort of talk as "suspicion 
mania." So far as the Banca Commerciale Itali- 
ana goes, I at least find that easy enough ; I quote 
that instance simply because it is a case where sus- 
picion has been dispelled, but in regard to a score 
of other business veins it is not so easy to dispel 
suspicion. This war has been a shock to reason- 
able men the whole world over. They have been 



68 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

forced to realise that after all a great number of 
Germans have been engaged in a crack-brained con- 
spiracy against the non-German world; that in a 
great number of cases when one does business with 
a German the business does not end with the indi- 
vidual German. We hated to believe that a busi- 
ness could be tainted by German partners or Ger- 
man associations. If now we err on the side of 
over-suspicion, if (outside Court circles of course) 
every German is suspect, it is the German's little 
weakness for patriotic disingenuousness that is 
most to blame. . . . 

But anyhow I do not think there is much good in 
a kind of witch-smelling among Italian enterprises 
to find the hidden German. Certain things are 
necessary for Italian prosperity and Italy must get 
them. The Italians want intelligent and helpful 
capital. They want a helpful France. They want 
bituminous coal for metallurgical purposes. They 
want cheap shipping. The French too want metal- 
lurgical coal. It is more important for civilisa- 
tion, for the general goodwill of the Allies and for 
Great Britain that these needs should be supplied 
than that individual British money-owners or ship- 
owners should remain sluggishly rich by insisting 
upon high security or high freights. The control 
of British coal-mining and shipping in the national 
interests — for international interests — rather 



BEHIND THE FRONT 69 

than for the creation of that particularly passive, 
obstructive and wasteful type of wealth, the wealth 
of the mere profiteer, is as urgent a necessity for the 
commercial welfare of France and Italy and the 
endurance of the Great Alliance, as it is for the 
well-being of the common man in Britain. 



§ 3 

I left my military guide at Verona on Saturday 
afternoon and I reached Milan in time to dine out- 
side Salvini's in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, 
with an Italian fellow story- writer. The place was 
as full as ever; we had to wait for a table. It is 
notable that there were still great numbers of young 
men not in uniform in Milan and Turin and Vi- 
cenza and Verona ; there is no effect anywhere of a 
depletion of men. The whole crowded place was 
smouldering with excitement. The diners looked 
about them as they talked, some talked loudly and 
seemed to be expressing sentiments. Newspaper 
vendors appeared at the intersection of the arcades, 
uttering ambiguous cries, and did a brisk business 
of flitting white sheets among the little tables. 

" To-night," said my companion, " I think we 
shall declare war upon Germany. The decision is 
being made." 

I asked intelligently why this had not been done 



70 ITALY, FEANCE AND BKITAIN 

before. I forget the precise explanation he gave. 
A young soldier in uniform, who had been dining 
at an adjacent table and whom I had not recognised 
before as a writer I had met some years previously 
in London, suddenly joined in our conversation, 
with a slightly different explanation. I had been 
carrying on a conversation in ungainly French, but 
now I relapsed into English. 

But indeed the matter of that declaration of war 
is as plain as daylight; the Italian national con- 
sciousness has not at first that direct sense of the 
German danger that exists in the minds of the 
three northern Allies. To the Italian the tradi- 
tional enemy is Austria, and this war is not pri- 
marily a war for any other end than the emancipa- 
tion of Italy. Moreover we have to remember that 
for years there has been serious commercial fric- 
tion between France and Italy, and considerable 
mutual elbowing in North Africa. Both French- 
men and Italians are resolute to remedy this now, 
but the restoration of really friendly and trustful 
relations is not to be done in a day. It has been 
an extraordinary misfortune for Great Britain that 
instead of boldly taking over her shipping from its 
private owners and using it all, regardless of their 
profit, in the interests of herself and her allies, her 
government has permitted so much of it as military 
and naval needs have not requisitioned to continue 



BEHIND THE FRONT 71 

to ply for gain, which the government itself has 
shared by a tax on war profits. The Anglophobe 
elements in Italian public life have made the ut- 
most use of this folly or laxity in relation more par- 
ticularly to the consequent dearness of coal in Italy. 
They have carried on an amazingly effective cam- 
paign in which this inconvenience, which is due en- 
tirely to our British slackness with the individual 
profiteer, is represented as if it were the delib- 
erate greed of the British state. This certainly 
contributed very much to fortify Italy's disincli- 
nation to slam the door on the German connec- 
tion. 

I did my best to make it clear to my two friends 
that so far from England exploiting Italy, I myself 
suffered in exactly the same way as any Italian, 
through the extraordinary liberties of our shipping 
interest. " I pay as well as you do,-' I said; " the 
shippers' blockade of Great Britain is more effec- 
tive than the submarines'. My food, my coal, my 
petrol are all restricted in the sacred name of pri- 
vate property. You see, capital in England has 
hitherto been not an exploitation but a hold up. 
We are learning differently now. . . . And any- 
how Mr. Runciman has been here, and given Italy 
assurances. . . ." 

In the train to Modane this old story recurred 
again. It is imperative that English readers 



72 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

should understand clearly how thoroughly these lit- 
tle matters have been worked by the enemy. 

Some slight civilities led to a conversation that 
revealed the Italian lady in the corner as an Irish- 
woman married to an Italian, and also brought out 
the latent English of a very charming elderly lady 
opposite to her. She had heard a speech, a won- 
derful speech from a railway train, by " the Lord 
Runciman." He had said the most beautiful things 
about Italy. 

I did my best to echo those beautiful things. 

Then the Irishwoman remarked that Mr. Runci- 
man had not satisfied everybody. She and her hus- 
band had met a minister — I found afterwards he 
was one of the members of the late Giolotti govern- 
ment — who had been talking very loudly and 
scornfully of the bargain Italy was making with 
England. I assured her that the desire of Eng- 
land was simply to give Italy all that she needed. 

" But," said the husband casually, " Mr. Runci- 
man is a ship-owner." 

I explained that he was nothing of the sort. It 
was true that he came of a ship-owning family — 
and perhaps inherited a slight tendency to see 
things from a ship-owning point of view — but in 
England we did not suspect a man on such a score 
as that. 



BEHIND THE FEONT 73 

" In Italy I think we should," said the husband 
of the Irish lady. 



§ 4 

This incidental discussion is a necessary part of 
my impression of Italy at war. The two western 
allies and Great Britain in particular have to re- 
member Italy's economic needs, and to prepare to 
rescue them from the blind exploitation of private 
profit. They have to remember these needs too, 
because, if they are left out of the picture, then it 
becomes impossible to understand the full measure 
of the risk Italy has faced in undertaking this war 
for an idea. With a Latin lucidity she has counted 
every risk, and with a Latin idealism she has taken 
her place by the side of those who fight for a liberal 
civilisation against a Byzantine imperialism. 

As I came out of the brightly lit Galleria Vittorio 
Emanuele into the darkened Piazza del Duomo I 
stopped under the arcade and stood looking up at 
the shadowy darkness of that great pinnacled barn, 
that marble bride-cake, which is, I suppose, the 
last southward fortress of the Franco-English 
Gothic. 

" It was here," said my host, " that we burnt the 
German stuff." 



74 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

"What German stufe?" 

" Pianos and all sorts of things. From the 
shops. It is possible, you know, to buy things too 
cheaply — and give too much for the cheapness." 



THE WESTERN WAR 

(September, 1916) 

I 

RUINS 

§ 1 

If I had to present some particular scene as typical 
of the peculiar vileness and mischief wrought by 
this modern warfare that Germany has elaborated 
and thrust upon the world, I do not think I should 
choose as my instance any of those great architec- 
tural wrecks that seem most to impress contem- 
porary writers. I have seen the injuries and ruins 
of the cathedrals at Arras and Soissons and the 
wreckage of the great church of Saint Eloi, I have 
visited the Hotel de Ville at Arras and seen photo- 
graphs of the present state of the Cloth Hall at 
Ypres — a building I knew very well indeed in its 
days of pride — and I have not been very deeply 
moved. I suppose that one is a little accustomed 
to Gothic ruins, and that there is always something 
monumental about old buildings ; it is only a ques- 
tion of degree whether they are more or less tum- 
ble-down. I was far more desolated by the obliter- 

75 



76 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

ation of such villages as Fricourt and Dompierre, 
and by the horrible state of the fields and gardens 
round about them, and my visit to Arras railway 
station gave me all the sensations of coming sud- 
denly on a newly murdered body. 

Before I visited the recaptured villages in the 
zone of the actual fighting, I had an idea that their 
evacuation was only temporary, that as soon as the 
war line moved towards Germany the people of the 
devastated villages would return to build their 
houses and till their fields again. But I see now 
that not only are homes and villages destroyed al- 
most beyond recognition, but the very fields are de- 
stroyed. They are wildernesses of shell craters; 
the old worked soil is buried and great slabs of 
crude earth have been flung up over it. No ordi- 
nary plough wall travel over this frozen sea, let 
alone that everywhere chunks of timber, horrible 
tangles of rusting wire, jagged fragments of big 
shells, and a great number of unexploded shells — 
for the proportion of duds has been sometimes as 
high as one in four or five — are everywhere en- 
tangled in the mess. Often this chaos is stained 
yellow by high explosives, and across it run the 
twisting trenches and communication trenches 
eight, ten, or twelve feet deep. These will become 
water pits and mud pits into which beasts will falL 
It is incredible that there should be crops from any 



RUINS 77 

of this region of the push for many years to come. 
There is no shade left ; the roadside trees are splin- 
tered stumps with scarcely the spirit to put forth 
a leaf ; a few stunted thistles and weeds are the sole 
proofs that life may still go on. 

The villages of this wide battle region are not 
ruined ; they are obliterated. It is just possible to 
trace the roads in them, because the roads have been 
cleared and repaired for the passing of the guns and 
ammunition. Fricourt is a tangle of German dug- 
outs. One dug-out in particular there promises to 
become a show place. It must be the masterpiece 
of some genius for dug-outs; it is made as if its 
makers enjoyed the job ; it is like the work of some 
horrible badger among the vestiges of what were 
pleasant human homes. You are taken down a 
timbered staircase into its warren of rooms and 
passages; you are shown the places under the 
craters of the great British shells, where the wood 
splintered but did not come in. (But the arrival 
of those shells must have been a stunning moment.) 
There are a series of ingenious bolting shafts set 
with iron climbing bars. In this place German 
officers and soldiers have lived continually for 
nearly two years. This war is, indeed, a Trog- 
lodytic propaganda. You come up at last at the 
far end into what was once the cellar of a decent 
Frenchman's home. 



78 ITALY, FEANCE AND BRITAIN 

But there are stranger subterranean refuges than 
that at Fricourt. At Dompierre the German 
trenches skirted the cemetery, and they turned the 
dead out of their vaults and made lurking places 
of the tombs. I walked with M. Joseph Eeinach 
about this place, picking our way carefully amidst 
the mud holes and the wire, and watched the shells 
bursting away over the receding battle line to the 
west. The wreckage of the graves was Dureresque. 
And here would be a fragment of marble angel and 
here a split stone with an inscription. Splinters 
of coffins, rusty iron crosses and the petals of tin 
flowers were trampled into the mud, amidst the 
universal barbed wire. A little distance down the 
slope is a brand new cemetery, with new metal 
wreaths and even a few flowers ; it is a disciplined 
array of uniform wooden crosses, each with its list 
of soldiers' names. Unless I am wholly mistaken 
in France no Germans will ever get a chance for 
ever more to desecrate that second cemetery as they 
have done its predecessor. 

We walked over the mud heaps and litter that 
had once been houses towards the centre of Dom- 
pierre village, and tried to picture to ourselves what 
the place had been. Many things are recognisable 
in Dompierre that have altogether vanished at Fri- 
court; for instance, there are quite large triangular 
pieces of the church wall upstanding at Dompierre. 



RUINS 79 

And a mile away perhaps down the hill on the road 
towards Amiens, the ruins of the sugar refinery are 
very distinct. A sugar refinery is an affair of big 
iron receptacles and great flues and pipes and so 
forth, and iron does not go down under gun fire as 
stone or brick does. The whole fabric was rusty, 
bent and twisted, gaping with shell holes, the rag- 
gedest display of old iron, but it still kept its gen- 
eral shape, as a smashed, battered, and sunken iron- 
clad might do at the bottom of the sea. 

There wasn't a dog left of the former life of 
Dompierre. There was not even much war traffic 
that morning on the worn and muddy road. The 
guns muttered some miles away to the west, and a 
lark sang. But a little way further on was an in- 
tennediate dressing station, rigged up with wood 
and tarpaulings, and orderlies were packing two 
wounded men into an ambulance. The men on the 
stretchers were grey faced, they had come out of 
mud and they looked as though they had been trod- 
den on by some gigantic dirty boot. 

As we came back towards where our car waited 
by the cemetery I heard the jingle of a horseman 
coming across the space behind us. I turned and 
beheld one of the odd contrasts that seem always 
to be happening in this incredible war. This man 
was, I suppose, a native officer of some cavalry 
force from French north Africa. He was a hand- 



80 ITALY, FEANCE AND BRITAIN 

some dark brown Arab, wearing a long yellow- 
white robe and a tall cap about which ran a band of 
sheepskin. He was riding one of those little fine 
lean horses with long tails that I think are Bar- 
bary horses, his archaic saddle rose fore and aft of 
him, and the turned-up toes of his soft leather 
boots were stuck into great silver stirrups. He 
might have ridden straight out of the Arabian 
Nights. He passed thoughtfully, picking his way 
delicately among the wire and the shell craters, and 
coming into the road, broke into a canter and van- 
ished in the direction of the smashed-up refinery. 



About such towns as Rheims or Arras or Soissons 
there is an effect of waiting stillness like nothing 
else I have ever experienced. At Arras the situ- 
ation is almost incredible to the civilian mind. 
The British hold the town, the Germans hold a 
northern suburb; at one point near the river the 
trenches are just four metres apart. This state of 
tension has lasted for long months. 

Unless a very big attack is contemplated, I sup- 
pose there is no advantage in an assault; across 
that narrow interval we should only get into 
trenches that might be costly or impossible to hold, 
and so it would be for the Germans on our side. 



RUINS 81 

But tliere is a kind of etiquette observed ; loud vul- 
gar talking on either side of the four metre gap 
leads at once to bomb throwing. And meanwhile 
on both sides guns of various calibre keep up an 
intermittent fire, the German guns register — I 
think that is the right term — on the cross of Arras 
cathedral, the British guns search lovingly for the 
German batteries. As one walks about the silent 
streets one hears, " Bang — Pheeee — woooo " and 
then far away, '^ dump." One of ours. Then pres- 
ently back comes, "Pheeee — woooo — Bang!" 
One of theirs. 

Amidst these pleasantries, the life of the town 
goes on. Shops are doing business behind closed 
shutters. The cafes flourish. Le Hon d' Arras, an 
excellent illustrated paper, produces its valiant 
sheets, and has done so since the siege began. 

The current number of Le Lion d^ Arras had to 
report a local German success. Overnight they 
had killed a gendarme. There is to be a public 
funeral and much ceremony. It is rare for any 
one now to get killed; everything is so systema- 
tised. 

You may buy postcards with views of the de- 
struction at different stages, and send them off 
with the Arras postmark. The town is not without 
a certain business activity. There is, I am told, 
a considerable influx of visitors of a special sort; 



82 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

they wear khaki and lead the Troglodytic life. 
They play cards and gossip and sleep in the shad- 
ows, and may not walk the streets. I had one 
glimpse of a dark crowded cellar. Now and then 
one sees a British soldier on some special errand; 
he keeps to the pavement, mindful of the spying 
German sausage balloon in the air. The streets 
are strangely quiet and grass grows between the 
stones. 

The Hotel de Ville and the cathedral are now 
mostly heaps of litter, but many streets of the town 
have suffered very little. Here and there a house 
has been crushed and one or two have been bisected, 
the front reduced to a heap of splinters and the back 
halves of the rooms left so that one sees the bed, 
the hanging end of the carpet, the clothes cupboard 
yawning open, the pictures still on the wall. In 
one place a lamp stands on a chest of drawers, on 
a shelf of floor cut off completely from the world 
below. . . . Pheeee — woooo — Bang! One would 
be irresistibly reminded of a Sunday afternoon in 
the city of London, if it were not for those un- 
meaning explosions. 

I went to the station, a dead railway station. A 
notice-board requested us to walk round the silent 
square on the outside pavement and not across it. 
The German sausage balloon had not been up for 
days; it had probably gone off to the Somme; the 



RUINS 83 

Somme was a terrible vortex just then which was 
sucking away the sources of the whole German 
line; but still discipline is discipline. The sau- 
sage might come peeping up at any moment over 
the station roof, and so we skirted the square. 
Arras was fought for in the early stage of the war ; 
two lines of sand-bagged breastworks still run 
obliquely through the station; one is where the 
porters used to put luggage upon cabs and one runs 
down the length of the platform. The station was 
a fine one of the modern type, with a glass roof 
whose framework still remains, though the glass 
powders the floor and is like a fine angular gravel 
underfoot. The rails are rails of rust, and corn- 
flowers and mustard and tall grasses grow amidst 
the ballast. The waiting-rooms have suffered from 
a shell or so, but there are still the sofas of green 
plush, askew, a little pulled from their places. A 
framed shipping advertisement hung from the wall, 
the glass smashed. The ticket bureau is as if a 
giant had leant against it ; on a table and the floor 
are scattered a great number of tickets, mostly still 
done up in bundles, to Douai, to Valenciennes, to 
Lens and so on. These tickets are souvenirs too 
portable to resist. I gave way to that common 
weakness. 

I went out and looked up and down the line; 
two deserted goods trucks stood as if they sheltered 



84 ITALY, FEANCE AND BRITAIN 

under a footbridge. The grass poked out through 
their wheels. The railway signals seemed uncer- 
tain in their intimations; some were up and some 
were down. And it was as still and empty as a 
summer afternoon in Pompeii. No train has come 
into Arras for two long years now. 

We lunched in a sunny garden with various men 
who love Arras but are weary of it, and we disputed 
about Irish politics. We discussed the political 
future of Mr. F. E. Smith. We also disputed 
whether there was an equivalent in English for 
embiisque. Every now and then a shell came over 

— an aimless shell. 

A certain liveliness marked our departure from 
the town. Possibly the Germans also listen for the 
rare infrequent automobile. At any rate, as we 
were just starting on our way back — it is improper 
to mention the exact point from which we started 

— came " Pheeeeee — woooo." Quite close. But 
there was no Bang! One's mind hung expectant 
and disappointed. It was a dud shell. 

And then suddenly I became acutely aware of 
the personality of our chauffeur. It was not his 
business to talk to us, but he turned his head, 
showed a sharp profile, wry lips and a bright ex- 
cited eye, and remarked, ^' That was a near one — 
anyhow." He then cut a corner over the pavement 
and very nearly cut it through a house. He 



KUINS 85 

bumped us over a shell liole and began to toot his 
horn. At every gateway, alley, and cross road in 
those silent and empty streets of Arras and fre- 
quently in between, he tooted punctiliously. (It 
is not proper to sound motor horns in Arras.) I 
cannot imagine what the listening Germans made 
of it. We passed the old gates of that city of fear, 
still tooting vehemently, and then with shoulders 
eloquent of his feelings, our chauffeur abandoned 
the horn altogether and put his whole soul into the 
accelerator. . . . 

§3 

Soissons was in very much the same case as 
Arras. There was the same pregnant silence in her 
streets, the same effect of waiting for the moment 
which draws nearer and nearer, when the brood- 
ing German lines away there will be full of the 
covert activities of retreat, when the streets of the 
old town will stir with the joyous excitements of 
the conclusive advance. 

The organisation of Soissons for defence is per- 
fect. I may not describe it, but think of whatever 
would stop and destroy an attacking party or foil 
the hostile shell. It is there. Men have had noth- 
ing else to do and nothing else to think of for two 
years. I crossed the bridge the English made in 
the pursuit after the Marne, and went into the first 
line trenches and peeped towards the invisible 



86 ITALY, FKANCE AND BKITAIN 

enemy. To show me exactly where to look a sev- 
enty-five obliged with a shell. In the crypt of the 
Abbey of St. Medard near by — it must provoke the 
Germans bitterly to think that all the rest of the 
building vanished ages ago — the French boys sleep 
beside the bones of King Childebert the Second. 
They shelter safely in the prison of Louis the Pious. 
An ineffective shell from a German seventy-seven 
burst in the walled garden close at hand as I came 
out from those thousand-year-old memories again. 
The cathedral at Soissons had not been nearly 
so completely smashed up as the one at Arras; I 
doubt if it has been very greatly fired into. There 
is a peculiar beauty in the one long vertical strip 
of blue sky between the broken arches in the chief 
gap where the wall has tumbled in. And the peo- 
ple are holding on in many cases exactly as they 
are doing in Arras; I do not know whether it is 
habit or courage that is most apparent in this per- 
sistence. About the chief place of the town there 
are ruined houses, but some invisible hand still 
keeps the grass of the little garden within bounds 
and has put out a bed of begonias. In Paris I met 
a charming American writer, the wife of a French 
artist, the lady who wrote My House on the Field 
of Honour. She gave me a queer little anecdote. 
On account of some hospital work she had been al- 
lowed to visit Soissons — a rare privilege for a 



KUINS 87 

woman — and she stayed the night in a lodging. 
The room into which she was shown was like any 
other French provincial bedroom, and after her 
Anglo-Saxon habit she walked straight to the win- 
dows to open them. 

They looked exactly like any other French bed- 
room windows, with neat, clean white lace curtains 
across them. The curtains had been put there, be- 
cause they were the proper things to go there. 

"Madame," said the hostess, "need not trouble 
to open the glass. There is no more glass in Sois- 
sons." 

But there were the curtains nevertheless. There 
was all the precise delicacy of the neatly curtained 
home life of France. 

And she told me too of the people at dinner, and 
how as the little serving maid passed about a proud 
erection of cake and conserve and cream, came the 
familiar " Pheeeee — wooooo — Bang! " 

" That must have been the Seminaire," said some 
one. 

As one speaks of the weather or a passing cart. 

" It was in the Rue de la Buerie, M'sieur," the 
little maid asserted with quiet conviction, poising 
the trophy of confectionery for Madame Huard 
with an unshaking hand. 

So stoutly do the roots of French life hold be- 
neath the tramplings of war. 



II 

THE GRADES OF WAU 



SoissoNS and Arras when I visited them were like 
samples of the deadlock war; they were like Bloch 
come true. The living fact about war so far is that 
Bloch has not come true — yet. I think in the end 
he will come true, but not so far as this war is con- 
cerned, and to make that clear it is necessary to 
trouble the reader with a little disquisition upon 
war — omitting as far as is humanly possible all 
mention of Napoleon's campaigns. 

The development of war has depended largely 
upon two factors. One of these is invention. 
New weapons and new methods have become avail- 
able, and have modified tactics, strategy, the rela- 
tive advantage of offensive and defensive. The 
other chief factor in the evolution of the war has 
been social organisation. As Machiavelli points 
out in his Art of War, there w^as insufiflcient social 
stability in Europe to keep a properly trained and 
disciplined infantiy in the field from the passing 
of the Roman legions to the appearance of the Swiss 



THE GRADES OF WAR 89 

footmen. He makes it very clear that he considers 
the fighting of the Middle Ages, though frequent 
and bloody, to be a confused, mobbing sort of affair, 
and politically and technically unsatisfactory. 
The knight was an egotist in armour. Machiavelli 
does small justice to the English bowmen. It is 
interesting to note that Switzerland, that present 
island of peace, was regarded by him as the mother 
of modern war. Swiss aggression was the curse of 
the Milanese. That is a remark by the way; our 
interest here is to note that modern war emerges 
upon history as the sixteenth century unfolds, as 
an affair in which the essential factor is the drilled 
and trained infantryman. The artillery is devel- 
oping as a means of breaking the infantry ; cavalry 
for charging them when broken, for pursuit and 
for scouting. To this day this triple division of 
forces dominates soldiers' minds. The mechanical 
development of warfare has consisted largely in 
the development of facilities for enabling or hin- 
dering the infantry to get to close quarters. As 
that has been made easy or difficult the offensive 
or the defensive has predominated. 

A history of military method for the last few cen- 
turies would be a record of successive alternate 
steps in which offensive and defensive contrivances 
pull ahead, first one and then the other. Their 
relative fluctuations are marked by the varying 



90 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

length of campaigns. From the very outset we 
have the ditch and the wall ; the fortified place upon 
a pass or main road, as a check to the advance. 
Artillery improves, then fortification improves. 
The defensive holds its own for a long period, wars 
are mainly siege wars, and for a century before 
the advent of Napoleon there are no big successful 
sweeping invasions, no marches upon the enemy 
capital and so on. There were wars of reduction, 
wars of annoyance. Napoleon developed the of- 
fensive by seizing upon the enthusiastic infantry of 
the republic, improving transport and mobile ar- 
tillery, using road-making as an aggressive method. 
In spite of the successful experiment of Torres 
Vedras and the warning of Plevna the offensive 
remained dominant throughout the nineteenth cen- 
tury. 

But three things were working quietly towards 
the rehabilitation of the defensive; firstly the in- 
creased range, accuracy and rapidity of rifle fire, 
with which we may include the development of the 
machine gun; secondly the increasing use of the 
spade, and thirdly the invention of barbed wire. 
By the end of the century these things had come 
so far into military theory as to produce the great 
essay of Bloch, and to surprise the British military 
people, who are not accustomed to read books or 
talk shop, in the Boer war. In the thinly popu- 



THE GRADES OF WAR 91 

lated war region of South Africa the diflQculties of 
forcing entrenched positions were largely met by 
outflanking, the Boers had only a limited amount of 
barbed wire and could be held down in their 
trenches by shrapnel, and even at the beginning of 
the present war there can be little doubt that we 
and our Allies were still largely unprepared for 
the full possibilities of trench warfare, we at- 
tempted a war of manoeuvres, war at about the 
grade to which war had been brought in 1898, and 
it was the Germans who first brought the war up 
to date by entrenching upon the Aisne. We had, 
of course, a few aeroplanes at that time, but they 
were used chiefly as a sort of accessory cavalry for 
scouting; our artillery was light and our shell al- 
most wholly shrapnel. 

Now the grades of warfare that have been devel- 
oped since the present war began, may be regarded 
as a series of elaborations and counter elaborations 
of the problem which begins as a line of trenches 
behind wire, containing infantry with rifles and 
machine guns. Against this an infantry attack 
with the bayonet, after shrapnel fails. This we 
will call Grade A. To this the offensive replies 
with improved artillery, and particularly with high 
explosive shell instead of shrapnel. By this the 
wire is blown away, the trench wrecked and the 
defender held down as the attack charges up. This 



92 ITALY, FEANCE AND BRITAIN 

is Grade B. But now appear the dug-out elaborat- 
ing the trench and the defensive battery behind the 
trench. The defenders, under the preliminary 
bombardment, get into the dug-outs with their 
rifles and machine guns, and emerge as fresh as 
paint as the attack comes up. Obviously there is 
much scope for invention and contrivance in the 
dug-out as the reservoir of counter attacks. Its 
possibilities have been very ably exploited by the 
Germans. Also the defensive batteries behind, 
which have of course the exact range of the cap- 
tured trench, concentrate on it and destroy the at- 
tack at the moment of victory. The trench falls 
back to its former holders under this fire and a 
counter attack. Check again for the offensive. 
Even if it can take, it cannot hold a position under 
these conditions. This we will call Grade A2; a 
revised and improved A. What is the retort from 
the opposite side? Obviously to enhance and ex- 
tend the range of the preliminary bombardment 
behind the actual trench line, to destroy or block, 
if it can, the dug-outs and destroy or silence the 
counter offensive artillery. If it can do that, it 
can go on; otherwise Bloch wins. 

If fighting went on only at the ground level Bloch 
would win at this stage, but here it is that the 
aeroplane comes in. From the ground it would be 
practically impossible to locate the enemies' dug- 



THE GRADES OF WAR 93 

outs, secondary defences, and batteries. But the 
aeroplane takes us immediately to a new grade of 
warfare, in which the location of the defender's 
secondary trenches, guns, and even machine-gun 
positions becomes a matter of extreme precision — 
provided only that the offensive has secured com- 
mand of the air and can send his aeroplanes freely 
over the defender lines. Then the preliminary 
bombardment becomes of a much more extensive 
character; the defender's batteries are tackled by 
the overpowering fire of guns they are unable to 
locate and answer; the secondary dug-outs and 
strong places are plastered down, a barrage fire 
shuts off support from the doomed trenches, the 
men in these trenches are held down by a concen- 
trated artillery fire and the attack goes up at last 
to hunt them out of the dug-outs and collect the sur- 
vivors. Until the attack is comfortably established 
in the captured trench, the fire upon the old coun- 
ter attack position goes on. This is the grade. 
Grade B2, to which modern warfare has attained 
upon the Somme front. The appearance of the 
Tank has only increased the offensive advantage. 
There, at present, warfare rests. 

There is, I believe, only one grade higher possi- 
ble. The success of B2 depends upon the complete- 
ness of the aerial observation. The invention of an 
anti-aircraft gun which would be practically sure 



94 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

of hitting and bringing down an aeroplane at any 
height whatever up to 20,000 feet, would restore the 
defensive and establish w^hat I should think must 
be the final grade of war, A3. But at present noth- 
ing of the sort exists and nothing of the sort is 
likelj to exist for a very long time ; at present hit- 
ting an aeroplane by any sort of gun at all is a 
rare and uncertain achievement. Such a gun is 
not impossible and therefore we must suppose such 
a gun will some day be constructed, but it will be 
of a novel type and character, unlike anything at 
present in existence. The grade of fighting that I 
was privileged to witness on the Somme, the grade 
at which a steady successful offensive is possible, 
is therefore, I conclude, the grade at which the 
present war will end. 



§ 2 

But now having thus spread out the broad theory 
of the business, let me go on to tell some of the actu- 
alities of the Somme offensive. I visited both the 
French and English fronts, and I have brought 
away an impression that at the time of my visit, 
modern war at its highest level, war at grade B2, 
was being fought most perfectly and systematically 
by the French. Comparisons in these matters are 
difficult I know, but my impression is at least car- 



THE GRADES OF WAR 95 

ried out by the fact that at the time of my visit the 
French were advancing more rapidly, taking more 
prisoners and suffering a lower percentage of 
casualties than the British. In certain respects, 
however, the British were developing novelties 
ahead of the French. The key fact upon both Brit- 
ish and French fronts was the complete ascendency 
of the Allied aeroplanes. It is the necessary pre- 
liminary condition for the method upon which the 
great generals of the French army rely in this sani- 
tary task of shoving the German Thing off the soil 
of Belgium and France back into their own land. 
A man who is frequently throwing out prophe- 
cies is bound to score a few successes, and one that 
I may legitimately claim is my early insistence 
upon the fact that the quality of the German avi- 
ator was likely to be inferior to that of his French 
or British rival. The ordinary German has neither 
the flexible quality of body, the quickness of nerve, 
the temperament, nor the mental habits that make 
a successful aviator. This idea was first put into 
my head by considering the way in which Germans 
walk and carry themselves, and by noting the dif- 
ference in nimbleness between the cyclists in the 
streets of German and French towns. It was con- 
firmed by a conversation I had with a German avi- 
ator who was also a dramatist, and who came to see 
me upon some copyright matter in 1912. He 



96 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

broached the view that aviation would destroy de- 
mocracy, because he said only aristocrats would 
make aviators. (He was a man of good family.) 
With a duke or so in my mind I asked him why. 
Because, he explained, a man without aristocratic 
quality in tradition, cannot possiblj^ endure the 
" high loneliness " of the air. That sounded rather 
like nonsense at the time, and then I reflected that 
for a Prussian that might be true. There may be 
something in the German composition that does de- 
mand association and the support of pride and 
training before dangers can be faced. The Ger- 
mans are social and methodical, the French and 
English by comparison chaotic and instinctive; 
perhaps the very readiness for a conscious orderli- 
ness that makes the German so formidable upon 
the ground, so thorough and so fore-seeing, makes 
him slow and unsure in the air. At any rate the 
experiences of this war have seemed to carry out 
this hypothesis. The German aviators will not as 
a class stand up to those of the Allies. They are 
not nimble in the air. Such champions as they 
have produced have been men of one trick ; one of 
their great men, Immelmann — he was put down 
by an English boy a month or so ago — had a sort 
of hawk's swoop. He would go very high and then 
come down at his utmost pace at his antagonist, 
firing his machine gun at him as he came. If he 



THE GRADES OF WAR 97 

missed in this hysterical lunge, he went on down. 
. . . This does not strike the Allied aviator as very 
brilliant. A gentleman of that sort can sooner or 
later be caught on the rise by going for him over 
the German lines. 

The first phase, then, of the highest grade of- 
fensive, the ultimate development of war regard- 
less of expense, is the clearance of the air. Such 
German machines as are up are put down by fight- 
ing aviators. These last fly high ; in the clear blue 
of the early morning they look exactly like gnats; 
some trail a little smoke in the sunshine ; they take 
their machine guns in pursuit over the German 
lines, and the German anti-aircraft guns, the Archi- 
balds, begin to pattern the sky about them with lit- 
tle balls of black smoke. From below one does not 
see men nor feel that men are there; it is as if it 
were an affair of midges. Close after the fighting 
machines come the photographic aeroplanes, with 
cameras as long as a man is high, fiying low — at 
four or five thousand feet that is — over the enemy 
trenches. The Archibald leaves these latter alone ; 
it cannot fire a shell to explode safely so soon after 
firing ; but they are shot at with rifles and machine 
guns. They do not mind being shot at; only the 
petrol tank and the head and thorax of the pilot 
are to be considered vital. They will come back 
with forty or fifty bullet holes in the fabric. They 



98 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

will go under this fire along the length of the Ger- 
man positions exposing plate after plate; one ma- 
chine will get a continuous panorama of many 
miles and then come back straight to the aerodrome 
to develop its plates. 

There is no waste of time about the business, the 
photographs are developed as rapidly as possible. 
Within an hour and a half after the photographs 
were taken the first prints are going through into 
the bureau for the examination of the photographs. 
It was in all this part of the work that it seemed 
to me the French were rather in front of the Brit- 
ish ; they were more rapid ; their work rooms were 
better arranged and their methods of examination 
more businesslike. It has probably been planned 
by some experienced business organiser, while the 
British organisation, photographs at this end of 
the village and maps at that, and a sort of gossip- 
ing drift between the two, had all the casualness 
of the rather absent-minded amateur. But that 
may be a chance contrast. And things soon get 
put right nowadays. In the end both British and 
French air photographs are thoroughly scrutinised 
and marked. 

An air photograph to an inexperienced eye is not 
a very illuminating thing; one makes out roads, 
blurs of wood, and rather vague buildings. But 
the examiner has an eye that has been in training ; 



THE GRADES OF WAR 99 

he is a picked man; he has at hand yesterday's 
photographs and last week's photographs, marked 
maps and all sorts of aids and records. If he is a 
Frenchman he is only too happy to explain his 
ideas and methods. Here, he will point out, is a 
little difference between the German trench beyond 
the wood since yesterday. For a number of rea- 
sons he thinks that will be a new machine gun em- 
placement ; here at the corner of the farm wall they 
have been making another. This battery here — 
isn't it plain? Well, it's a dummy. The grass in 
front of it hasn't scorched, and there's been no seri- 
ous wear on the road here for a week. Presently 
the Germans will send one or two waggons up and 
down that road and instruct them to make figures 
of eight to imitate scorching on the grass in front 
of the gun. We know all about that. The real 
wear on the road, compare this and this and this, 
ends here at this spot. It turns off into the wood. 
There's a sort of track in the trees. Now look 
where the trees are just a little displaced ! ( This 
lens is rather better for that.) That's one gun. 
You see? Here, I will show you another. . . . 

ThUt process goes on two or three miles behind 
the front line. Very clean young men in white 
overalls do it as if it were a labour of love. And 
the Germans in the trenches, the German gunners, 
know it is going on. They know that in the quick- 



100 ITALY, FEANCE AND BRITAIN 

est possible way these observations of the aeroplane 
that was over them just now will go to the gunners. 
The careful gunner, firing by the map and marking 
by aeroplane, kite balloon or direct observation, 
will be getting on to the located guns and machine 
guns in another couple of hours. The French 
claim that they have located new batteries, got their 
tir de demolition upon them and destroyed them 
within five hours. The British I told of that found 
it incredible. Every day the French print special 
maps showing the guns, sham guns, trenches, every- 
thing of significance behind the German lines, 
showing everything that has happened in the last 
four-and-twenty hours. It is pitiless. It is in- 
decent. The map making and printing goes on in 
the room next and most convenient to the examina- 
tion of the photographs. And, as I say, the German 
army knows of this, and knows that it cannot pre- 
vent it because of its aerial weakness. That knowl- 
edge is not the least among the forces that is 
crumpling up the German resistance upon the 
Somme. 

I visited some French guns during the tir de de- 
moUtion phase. I counted nine aeroplanes' and 
twenty-six kite balloons in the air at the same time. 
There was nothing German visible in the air at all. 

It is a case of eyes and no eyes. Against this 
precise and careful method of localisation the Ger- 



THE GEADES OF WAR 101 

mans have only the listening method. It is a good 
method for the infrequent shells of such places as 
Arras or Soissons, but it is not good against a rapid 
fire. The microphone gets confused between this 
gun and that. The French attack resolves itself 
into a triple system of gun-fire. First for a day or 
so, or two or three days, there is demolition fire to 
smash up all the exactly located batteries, organi- 
sations, supports, behind the front line enemy 
trenches ; then comes barrage fire to cut off supplies 
and reinforcements; then, before the advance, the 
hammering down fire, " heads down," upon the 
trenches. When at last this stops and the infantry 
goes forward to rout out the trenches and the dug- 
outs, they go forward with a minimum of incon- 
venience. The first wave of attack fights, destroys, 
or disarms the surviving Germans and sends them 
back across the open to the French trenches. They 
run as fast as they can, hands up, and are shep- 
herded farther back. The French set to work to 
turn over the captured trenches and organise them- 
selves against any counter attack that may face the 
barrage fire. 

That is the formula of the present fighting, which 
the French have developed. After an advance 
there is a pause, while the guns move up nearer the 
Germans and fresh aeroplane reconnaissance goes 
on. Nowhere on this present offensive has a Ger- 



102 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

man counter attack had more than the most inci- 
dental success ; and commonly thej have had fright- 
ful losses. Then after a few days of refreshment 
and accumulation, the Allied attack resumes. 

That is the perfected method of the French of- 
fensive. I had the pleasure of learning its broad 
outlines in good company, in the company of M. 
Joseph Reinach and Colonel Carence, the military 
writer. Their talk together and with me and in 
the various messes at which we lunched was for the 
most part a keen discussion of every detail and 
every possibility of the offensive machine; every 
French officer's mess seems a little council upon 
the one supreme question in France, hoto to do it 
hest. M. Reinach has made certain suggestions 
about the co-operation of French and British that I 
will discuss elsewhere, but one great theme was the 
constitution of "the ideal battery." For years 
French military thought has been acutely attentive 
to the best number of guns for effective common 
action, and has tended rather to the small battery 
theory. My two companies were playing with the 
idea that the ideal battery was a battery of one big 
gun, with its own aeroplane and kite balloon mark- 
ing for it. I take it the commanding officer would 
spend much of his time in the air, which would 
scarcely suit some of our own senior gunners. 

At the time when I visited the British and French 



THE GRADES OF WAR 103 

fronts (early in September) I formed the impres- 
sion that this formula of attack was being far more 
thoroughly and effectively followed out by the 
French than by the British. I thought the French 
were altogether more businesslike. I make this 
statement with the most careful indication of the 
I)eriod to which it refers, because in all these mat- 
ters things change very rapidly and may at any 
time change. There is every reason to suppose that 
in the early stages of the Somme offensive the 
" science " of the British general staff was mark- 
edly below that of the French, and that very many 
thousands of British casualties were due to that 
inferiority. The British did their work, but they 
paid more heavily, and they were still paying more 
heavily early in September. The British infantry 
and the British subalterns were magnificent, the 
British aeroplane work was unsurpassable, the 
British guns and munitions are admirable in qual- 
ity and almost inexhaustibly abundant; but the 
offensive machine as a whole was certainly not yet 
knit together and working together like the French 
machine. The brute fact that English people have 
to face is that there is still something " amateur- 
ish " in the quality of the higher grades of British 
oflflcer. Typically he is brave as a lion and all that 
sort of thing, he has all the schoolboy virtues and 
so on, his social position is excellent, his appear- 



104 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

ance and his sense of appearances are exquisite, but 
when it comes to hard intellectual work he is, to 
speak plainly, a slacker, and he is often appallingly 
ignorant and timid or mulishly conservative in the 
face of ideas and novelties. 



§ 3 

But upon the British side if there does seem to be 
a certain wasteful want of logical coherence, there 
is also a very considerable amount of scattered ini- 
tiative of the brightest sort thrusting through the 
obstructions. That unsystematic individualism 
that wastes our men in attacks does seem to be as- 
sociated with the adventurous self-reliance needed 
in the air. The British aeroplanes do not simply 
fight the Germans out of the sky; they also make 
themselves an abominable nuisance by bombing the 
enemy trenches. For every German bomb that is 
dropped by aeroplane upon or behind the British 
lines, about twenty go down on the heads of the 
Germans. British air bombs upon guns, stores and 
communications do some of the work that the 
French effect by their systematic demolition fire. 

And the British aviator has discovered and is 
rapidly developing an altogether fresh branch of 
air activity in the machine-gun attack at a very low 
altitude. Originally I believe this was tried in 



THE GRADES OF WAR 105 

western Egypt, but now it is being increasingly used 
upon the British front in France. An aeroplane 
which comes down suddenly, travelling very rap- 
idly, to a few hundred feet, is quite hard enough 
to hit, even if it is not squirting bullets from a ma- 
chine gun as it advances. Against infantry in the 
open this sort of thing is extremely demoralising. 
It is a method of attack still in its infancy, but there 
are great possibilities for it in the future, when the 
bending and cracking German line gives as ulti- 
mately it must give if this offensive does not re- 
lax. 

Now a cavalry pursuit alone may easily come 
upon disaster, cavalry can be so easily held up by 
wire and a few machine guns. I think the Germans 
have reckoned on that and on automobiles, prob- 
ably only the decay of their morale prevents their 
opening their lines now on the chance of the British 
attempting some such folly as a big cavalry ad- 
vance, but I do not think the Germans have reck- 
oned on the use of machine guns in aeroplanes, sup- 
ported by and supporting cavalry or automobiles. 
At the present time I should imagine there is no 
more perplexing consideration amidst the many 
perplexities of the German military intelligence 
than the new complexion put upon pursuit by these 
low level air developments. It may mean that in 
all sorts of positions where they had counted confi- 



106 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

dently on getting away, they may not be able to get 
away — from the face of a scientific advance prop- 
erly commanding and using modern material in a 
dexterous and intelligent manner. 



Ill 

THE WAR LANDSCAPE 

§ 1 

I SAW rather more of the British than of the 
French aviators because of the vileness of the 
weather when I visited the latter. It is quite im- 
possible for me to institute comparisons between 
these two services. I should think that the British 
organisation I saw would be hard to beat, and that 
none but the French could hope to beat it. On the 
Western front the aviation has been screwed up to 
a very much higher level than on the Italian line. 
In Italy it has not become, as it has in France, the 
decisive factor. The war on the Carso front in 
Italy — I say nothing of the mountain warfare, 
w^hich is a thing in itself — is in fact still in the 
stage that I have called B. It is good warfare well 
waged, but not such an intensity of warfare. It 
has not, as one says of pianos and voices, the same 
compass. 

This is true in spite of the fact that the Italians 
alone of all the western powers have adopted a type 

of aeroplane larger and much more powerful than 

107 



108 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

anything except the big Russian machines. They 
are not at all suitable for any present purpose upon 
the Italian front, but at a later stage, when the 
German is retiring and Archibald no longer 
searches the air, they would be invaluable on the 
western front because of their enormous bomb or 
machine gun carrying capacity. " But suflflcient 
for the day is the swat thereof," as the British pub- 
lic schoolboy says, and no doubt we shall get them 
when we have sufficiently felt the need for them. 
The big Caproni machines which the Italians pos- 
sess are of 300 h.p. and will presently be of 500 h.p. 
One gets up a gangway into them as one gets into a 
yacht; they have a main deck, a forward machine 
gun deck and an aft machine gun; one may walk 
about in them; in addition to guns and men they 
carry a very considerable weight of bombs beneath. 
They cannot of course get up with the speed nor 
soar to the height of our smaller aeroplanes ; it is as 
carriers in raids behind a force of fighting machines 
that they should find their use. 

The British establishment I visited was a very 
refreshing and reassuring piece of practical organi- 
sation. The air force of Great Britain has had the 
good fortune to develop with considerable freedom 
from the old army tradition ; many of its officers are 
ex-civil engineers and so forth; Headquarters is a 
little shy of technical direction; and all this in a 



THE WAR LANDSCAPE 109 

service that is still necessarily experimental and 
plastic is to the good. There is little doubt that, 
given a release from prejudice, bad associations and 
the equestrian tradition, British technical intelli- 
gence and energy can do just as well as the French. 
Our problem with our army is not to create in- 
telligence, there is an abundance of it, but to re- 
lease it from a dreary social and official pressure. 
The air service ransacks the army for men with 
technical training and sees that it gets them, there 
is a real keenness upon the work, and the men in 
these great mobile hangars talk shop as readily and 
clearly as Frenchmen do. One met with none of 
that interest, real or feigned, in the possibility of 
trout-fishing or fox-hunting behind the front or in 
playing with golf sticks and suchlike toys, that one 
still meets here and there (in spite of the July 
casualty lists) among highly placed officers at other 
points in the British front. 

I have already mentioned and the newspapers 
have told abundantly of the pluck, daring, and ad- 
mirable work of our aviators; what is still unten- 
able in any detail is the energy and ability of the 
constructive and repairing branch upon whose effi- 
ciency their feats depend. Perhaps the most in- 
teresting thing I saw in connection with the air 
work was the hospital for damaged machines and 
the dump to which those hopelessly injured are 



no ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

taken, in order that they may be disarticulated and 
all that is sound in them used for reconstruction. 
How excellently this work is being done may be 
judged from the fact that our offensive in July 
started with a certain number of aeroplanes, a num- 
ber that would have seemed fantastic in a story a 
year before the war began. These aeroplanes were 
in constant action; they fought, they were shot 
down, they had their share of accidents. Not only 
did the repair department make good every loss, but 
after three weeks of the offensive the army was 
fighting with fifty more machines than at the out- 
set. One goes through a vast Rembrandtesque shed 
opening upon a great sunny field, in whose cool 
shadows rest a number of interesting patients ; cap- 
tured and slightly damaged German machines, ma- 
chines of our own with the scars of battle upon 
them, one or two cases of bad landing. The star 
case came from over Peronne. It had come in 
two days ago. 

I examined this machine and I will tell the state 
it was in, but I perceive that what I have to tell will 
read not like a sober statement of truth but like 
strained and silly lying. The machine had had a 
direct hit from an Archibald shell. The propeller 
had been clean blown away ; so had the machine gun 
and all its fittings. The engines had been stripped 
naked and a good deal bent about. The timber stay 



THE WAR LANDSCAPE 111 

over the aviator had been broken, so that it is 
marvellous the wings of the machine did not shut 
up at once like the wings of a butterfly. The soli- 
tary aviator had been wounded in the face. He had 
then come down in a long glide into the British 
lines, and made a tolerable landing. . . . 



One consequence of the growing importance of 
the aeroplane in warfare is the development of a 
new military art, the art of camouflage. Camou- 
flage is humbugging disguise, it is making things 

— and especially in this connection, military things 

— seem not what they are, but something peaceful 
and rural, something harmless and quite uninter- 
esting to aeroplane observers. It is the art of mak- 
ing big guns look like haystacks and tents like level 
patches of field. 

Also it includes the art of making attractive 
models of guns, camps, trenches and the like that 
are not bona-fide guns, camps, or trenches at all, so 
that the aeroplane bomb-dropper and the aeroplane 
observer may waste his time and energies and the 
enemy gunfire be misdirected. In Italy I saw 
dummy guns so made as to deceive the very elect at 
a distance of a few thousand feet. The camouflage 
of concealment aims either at invisibility or imita- 



112 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

tion ; I have seen a supply train look like a row of 
cottages, its smoke-stack a chimney, with the tops 
of sham-palings running along the back line of the 
engine and creepers painted up its sides. But that 
was a flight of the imagination; the commonest 
camouflage is merely to conceal. Trees are brought 
up and planted near the object to be hidden, it is 
painted in the same tones as its background, it is 
covered with an awning painted to look like grass 
or earth. I suppose it is only a matter of develop- 
ment before a dummy cow or so is put up to chew 
the cud on the awning. The French have a special 
open green fabric made of rushes which can be 
stretched out upon poles or the roofs of sheds with 
extreme rapidity and which is remarkably effective. 
I saw none of this on the British front. But there 
were great rolls of it, van after van, going up to the 
front on the French side. 

The French, being I think on the whole much 
better acquainted with the commonplaces of science 
than the senior British officers, have taken a tip 
from the colouration of animals in this matter. As 
every magazine reader knows nowadays, animal 
colours even when apparently conspicuous are ar- 
ranged almost always so as to break the outline. 
The okapi for instance, though it is a beast of white 
and black, becomes inanimate light and shadow at a 
few yards' distance. The French, grasping this idea 



THE WAR LANDSCAPE 113 

firmly, paint their tents and guns in map-like shapes 
of strong green and fairly bright soil-yellow, colour- 
ings that take them down into the landscape at 
a surprisingly small distance. The principle of 
breaking the outline does not seem to have been 
fully grasped upon the British front. Much of the 
painting of guns and tents that one sees is a feeble 
and useless dabbing or striping ; some of the tents I 
saw were done in concentric bands or radiating 
stripes that would on the whole increase their visi- 
bility from above. In one place I saw a hangar 
painted a good grey-green, but surrounded and out- 
lined by spotless white tents. These things irri- 
tate a patriotic mind anxious to be proud of its 
country even in little things. I wanted to get down 
from my automobile and talk very plainly and 
simply and rudely to some one upon the elements of 
camouflage and the morality of taking risks in w^ar. 
My impression — it may be quite an unjust one — 
was that some of our British colonels misunder- 
stand and dislike camouflage. 

Let me, for the purposes of illustration, flash a 
caricature upon the screen of a certain Colonel X. 
of the old school, who is still, for want of proper 
combing out, in a position of responsibility at the 
front. Let me explain clearly that I have never 
met him, that I have no one in my mind, but that 
here and there I fancied I saw his influence. He is. 



114 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

you know, a quintessential army man, a good 
sportsman, owns four thousand acres, hunts. 
Never reads much or any of that rot. Doesn't be- 
lieve much in any of this modern stuff. No. And 
particularly he doesn't like camouflage. He thinks 
a gun should look like a gun. He thinks a horse 
should look like a horse and that a soldier or a camp 
should be " smart " before anything else. This 
camouflage fills him with a bashful hostility. He 
thinks it almost as objectionable as double entendre. 
It is antipathetic to his simple straightforward 
sporting tastes. It is as if one handed over that 
nice white grandstand at Epsom for decorative im- 
provement to Mr. Roger Fry. It is like meeting a 
pretty woman who turns out to be clever and edu- 
cated and all that, and says things a man can't make 
head or tail of. . . . At any rate very many of the 
British tents look as though they had been dabbed 
over by a protesting man muttering " foolery " as 
he did it. With a good telescope the chief points of 
interest in the present British front in France 
would be visible from Mars. Happily the aerial 
predominance of the Allies prevents any very 
serious consequences of this queer little British 
weakness. But the effect of going from behind the 
French front to behind the English is like going 
from a brooding w^ood of green and blue into an 
open blaze of white canvas and khaki. 



THE WAR LANDSCAPE 115 

But camouflage or no camouflage, the bulk of 
both the French and British forces in the new won 
ground of the great offensive lay necessarily in the 
open. Only the big guns and the advanced Red 
Cross stations had got into pits and subterranean 
hiding places. The advance had been too rapid and 
continuous for the armies to make much of a toilette 
as they halted, and the destruction and the deso- 
lation of the country won afforded few facilities 
for easy concealment. Tents, transport, munitions, 
these all indicated an army on the march — at the 
rate of half a mile in a week or so, to Germany. 

§ 3 

A journey up from the base to the front trenches 
shows an interesting series of phases. One leaves 
Amiens, in which the normal life threads its way 
through crowds of resting men in khaki and horizon 
blue, in which staff officers in automobiles whisk 
hither and thither, in which there are nurses and 
even a few inexplicable ladies in worldly costume, 
in which restaurants and cafes are congested and 
busy, through which there is a perpetual coming 
and going of processions of heavy vans to the rail- 
way sidings. One dodges past a monstrous blue- 
black gun going up to the British front behind two 
resolute traction engines — the three sun-blistered 



116 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

young men in tlie cart that trails behind lounge in 
attitudes of haughty pride that would shame the 
ceiling gods cf Hampton Court. One passes 
through arcades of waiting motor vans, through 
suburbs still more intensely khaki or horizon blue, 
and so out upon the great straight poplar-edged 
road — to the front. Sometimes one laces through 
spates of heavy traflSc, sometimes the dusty road is 
clear ahead, now we pass a vast aviation camp, now 
a park of waiting field guns, now an encampment of 
cavalry. One turns aside, and abruptly one is in 
France — France as one knew it before the war, on 
a shady secondary road, past a delightful chateau 
behind its iron gates, past a beautiful church, and 
then suddenly we are in a village street full of 
stately Indian soldiers. 

It betrays no military secret to say that com- 
monly the rare tourist to the British offensive 
passes through Albert, Albert which is at last out 
of range of the German guns after nearly two 
years of tribulation, with its great modern red 
cathedral smashed to pieces and the great gilt Ma- 
donna and Child that once surmounted the tower 
now, as every one knows, hanging out horizontally 
over the road in an attitude that irresistibly sug- 
gests an imminent dive upon the passing traveller. 
One looks right up under it. 

Presently we begin to see German prisoners upon 



THE WAK LANDSCAPE 117 

the roads or in the fields, gangs of two or three 
hundred in their grey uniforms, armed with spades, 
pickaxes and so on, keeping the road in good re- 
pair and working so loyally, I am told, that they 
work better than the Tommies we put at the same 
job — a good mark, I think, for Hans. The whole 
lot look entirely contented, and are guarded by per- 
haps a couple of men in khaki. These German pris- 
oners do not attempt to escape, they have not the 
slightest desire for any more fighting, they have 
done their bit, they say, honour is satisfied; they 
give remarkably little trouble. A little way fur- 
ther on perhaps we pass their cage, a double 
barbed-wire enclosure with a few tents and huts 
within. 

A string of covered waggons passes by. I turn 
and see a number of men sitting inside and looking 
almost as cheerful as a beanfeast in Epping Forest. 
They make facetious gestures. They have a sub- 
dued sing-song going on. But one of them looks a 
little sick, and then I notice not very obtrusive 
bandages. " Sitting-up cases," my guide explains. 

These are part of the casualties of last night's 
fight. 

The fields on either side are now more evidently 
in the war zone. The array of carts, the patches of 
tents, the coming and going of men increases. But 
here are three women harvesting, and presently in 



118 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

a cornfield are German prisoners working under 
one old Frenchman. Then the fields become 
trampled again. Here is a village, not so very much 
knocked about, and passing through it we go 
slowly beside a long column of men going up to the 
front. We scan their collars for signs of some 
familiar regiment. These are new men going up 
for the first time ; there is a sort of solemn elation 
in many of their faces. 

The men coming down are usually smothered in 
mud or dust, and unless there has been a fight they 
look pretty well done up. They stoop under their 
equipment, and some of the youngsters drag. One 
pleasant thing about this coming down is the wel- 
come of the regimental band, which is usually at 
work as soon as the men turn off from the high road. 
I hear several bands on the British front; they do 
much to enhance the general cheerfulness. On one 
of these days of my tour I had the pleasure of 
seeing the — th Blankshires coming down after a 
fight. As we drew near I saw that they combined 
an extreme muddiness with an unusual elasticity. 
They all seemed to be looking us in the face instead 
of being too fagged to bother. Then I noticed a 
nice grey helmet dangling from one youngster's 
bayonet, in fact his eye directed me to it. A man 
behind him had a black German helmet of the type 
best known in English illustrations ; then two more 



THE WAR LANDSCAPE 119 

grey appeared. The catch of helmets had indeed 
been quite considerable. Then I perceived on the 
road bank above and marching parallel with this 
column, a double file of still muddier Germans. 
Either they wore caps or went bareheaded. There 
were no helmets among them. We do not rob our 
prisoners but — a helmet is a weapon. Anyhow, it 
is an irresistible souvenir. 

Now and then one sees afar on an ammunition 
dump, many hundreds of stacks of shells — without 
their detonators as yet — being unloaded from rail- 
way trucks, transferred from the broad gauge to 
the narrow gauge line, or loaded into motor trolleys. 
Now and then one crosses a railway line. The 
railway lines run everywhere now behind the 
British front, the construction follows the advance 
day by day. They go up as fast as the guns. One's 
guide remarks as the car bumps over the level cross- 
ing, " That is one of Haig's railways." It is an 
aspect of the Commander-in-Chief that has much 
impressed and pleased the men. And at last we be- 
gin to enter the region of the former Allied 
trenches, we pass the old German front line, we 
pass ruined houses, ruined fields, and thick patches 
of clustering wooden crosses and boards where the 
dead of the opening assaults lie. There are no 
more reapers now, there is no more green upon the 
fields, there is no green anywhere, scarcely a tree 



120 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 



survives by the roadside, but only overthrown 
trunks and splintered stumps ; the fields are wilder- 
nesses of shell craters and coarse weeds, the very 
woods are collections of blasted stems and stripped 
branches. This absolutely ravaged and ruined bat- 
tlefield country extends now along the front of the 
Somme offensive for a depth of many miles ; across 
it the French and British camps and batteries creep 
forward, the stores, the dumps, the railways creep 
forward, in their untiring, victorious thrust against 
the German lines. Overhead hum and roar the 
aeroplanes, away towards the enemy and humped, 
blue sausage-shaped kite balloons brood thought- 
fully, and from this point and that, guns, curiously 
invisible until they speak, flash suddenly and strike 
their one short hammer-blow of sound. 

Then one sees an enemy shell drop among the lit- 
tle patch of trees on the crest to the right, and kick 
up a great red-black mass of smoke and dust. We 
see it, and then we hear the whine of its arrival and 
at last the bang. The Germans are blind now, they 
have lost the air, they are firing by guesswork, and 
their knowledge of the abandoned territory. 

" They think they have got divisional headquar- 
ters there," some one remarks. ..." They 
haven't. But they keep on." 

In this zone where shells burst the wise auto- 
mobile stops and tucks itself away as inconspicu- 



THE WAR LANDSCAPE 121 

ously as possible close up to a lieap of ruins. There 
is very little trafifle on the road now except for a 
van or so that hurries up, unloads, and gets back as 
soon as possible. Mules and men are taking the 
stuff the rest of the journey. We are in a flattened 
village, all undermined by dug-outs that were in the 
original German second line. We report ourselves 
to a young Troglodyte in one of these, and are given 
a guide, and so set out on the last part of the journey 
to the ultimate point, across the land of shell craters 
and barbed wire litter and old and new trenches. 
We have all put on British steel helmets, hard but 
heavy and inelegant head coverings. I can write 
little that is printable about these aesthetic crimes. 
The French and German helmets are noble and 
beautiful things. These lumpish pans . . . 

They ought to be called by the name of the man 
who designed them. 

Presently we are advised to get into a communi- 
cation trench. It is not a very attractive communi- 
cation trench, and we stick to our track across the 
open. Three or four shells shiver overhead, but we 
decide they are British shells, going out. We 
reach a supporting trench in which men are waiting 
in a state of nearly insupportable boredom for the 
midday stew, the one event of interest in a day-long 
vigil. Here we are told imperatively to come right 
in at once, and we do. 



122 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

All communication trenches are tortuous and 
practically endless. On an offensive front they 
have vertical sides of unsupported earth and occa- 
sional soakaways for rain covered by wooden grat- 
ings, and they go on and on and on. At rare inter- 
vals they branch, and a notice board says " To Re- 
gent Street," or " To Oxford Street," or some such 
lie. It is all just trench. For a time you talk, but 
talking in single file soon palls. You cease to talk, 
and trudge. A great number of telephone wires 
come into the trench and cross and recross it. 
You cannot keep clear of them. Your helmet pings 
against them and they try to remove it. Some- 
times you have to stop and crawl under wires. 
Then you wonder what the trench is like in really 
wet weather. You hear a shell burst at no great 
distance. You pass two pages of The Strand Maga- 
zine. Perhaps thirty yards on you pass a cigarette 
end. After these sensational incidents the trench 
quiets down again and continues to wind endlessly 
— just a wiry, sandy, extremely narrow trench. A 
giant crack. 

At last you reach the front line trench. On an 
offensive sector it has none of the architectural in- 
terest of first line trenches at such places as Sois- 
sons or Arras. It was made a week or so ago by 
joining up shell craters, and if all goes well we 
move into the German trench along by the line of 



THE WAR LANDSCAPE 123 

scraggy trees, at which we peep discreetly, to-mor- 
row night. We can peep discreetly because just at 
present our guns are putting shrapnel over the 
enemy at the rate of about three shells a minute, the 
puffs follow each other up and down the line, and 
no Germans are staring about to see us. 

The Germans "strafed" this trench overnight, 
and the men are tired and sleepy. Our guns away 
behind us are doing their best now to give them a 
rest by strafing the Germans. One or two men are 
in each forward sap keeping a lookout; the rest 
sleep, a motionless sleep, in the earthy shelter pits 
that have been scooped out. One officer sits by a 
telephone under an earth-covered tarpauling, and 
a weary man is doing the toilette of a machine gun. 
We go on to a shallow trench in which we must 
stoop, and which has been badly knocked 
about. . . . Here we have to stop. The road to 
Berlin is not opened up beyond this point. 

My companion on this excursion is a man I have 
admired for years and never met before until I 
came out to see the war. Captain C. E. Montague, 
author of a book called A Hind Let Loose. He is 
a journalist let loose. Two-thirds of the junior 
British officers I met on this journey were really 
not " army men " at all. One has none of that feel- 
ing of having to deal with a highly specialised mind 
that made the old sort of officer such uncomfortable 



124 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

company for a discursive talker. They knew of 
nothing but about a few of the more popular 
theatres and about music halls and about people's 
relations. They had read a certain number of 
novels, but had either forgotten or never observed 
the titles. They thought philosophy, history, art 
or religion " a bit too deep " for them. This tradi- 
tion survives now only on the staffs. Now one 
finds that the apparent subaltern is really a musi- 
cian, or a musical critic, or an Egyptologist, or a 
solicitor, or a cloth manufacturer, or a writer. At 
the outbreak of the war my companion dyed his 
hair to conceal its tell-tale silver, and having been 
laughed to scorn by the ordinary recruiting people, 
enlisted in the sportsmen's battalion. He was 
wounded, and then the authorities discovered that 
he was likely to be of more use with a commission 
and drew him, in spite of considerable resistance, 
out of the firing line. To which he always returns 
whenever he can get a visitor to take with him as an 
excuse. He now stood up, fairly high and clear, 
explaining casually that the Germans were no 
longer firing, and showed me the points of interest. 
I had come right up to No Man's Land at last. 
It was under my chin. The skyline, the last sky- 
line before the British could look down on 
Bapaume, showed a mangey wood and a ruined vil- 



THE WAR LANDSCAPE 125 

lage, crouching under repeated gobbings of British 
shrapnel. " They've got a battery just there, and 
we're making it uncomfortable." No Man's Land 
itself is a weedy space broken up by shell craters, 
with very little barbed wire in front of us and very 
little in front of the Germans. " They've got 
snipers in most of the craters, and you see them at 
twilight hopping about from one to the other." 
We have very little wire because we don't mean to 
stay for very long in this trench, and the Germans 
have very little wire because they have not been 
able to get it up yet. They never will get it up 
now. . . . 

I had been led to believe that No Man's Land was 
littered with the unburied dead, but I saw nothing 
of the sort at this place. There had been no Ger- 
man counter attack since our men came up here. 
But at one point as we went along the trench there 
was a dull stench. "Germans, I think," said my 
guide, though I do not see how he could tell. 

He looked at his watch and remarked reluctantly, 
" If you start at once, you may just do it." 

I wanted to catch the Boulogne boat. It was 
then just past one in the afternoon. We met the 
stew as we returned along the communication 
trench, and it smelt very good indeed. . . . We 
hurried across the great spaces of rusty desolation 



126 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

upon which every now and again a German shell 
was bursting. . . . 

That night I was in my flat in London. I had 
finished reading the accumulated letters of some 
weeks, and I was just going comfortably to bed. 



IV 

NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES 

§ 1 

Such are the landscapes and method of modern 
war. It is more different in its nature from war as 
it was waged in the nineteenth century than that 
was from the nature of the phalanx or the legion. 
The nucleus fact — when I talked to General Joffre 
he was very insistent upon this point — is still as 
ever the ordinary fighting man, but all the acces- 
sories and conditions of his personal encounter with 
the fighting man of the other side have been revolu- 
tionised in a quarter of a century. The fighting 
together in a close disciplined order, shoulder to 
shoulder, which has held good for thousands of 
years as the best and most successful fighting, has 
been destroyed; the idea of breaking infantry 
formation as the chief offensive operation has dis- 
appeared, the cavalry charge and the cavalry pur- 
suit are as obsolete as the cross-bow. The modern 
fighting man is as individualised as a half back or a 
centre forward in a football team. Personal fight- 
ing has become " scrapping " again, an individual 

127 



128 ITALY, FEANCE AND BEITAIN 

adventure with knife, club, bomb, revolver or bay- 
onet. In this war we are working out things in- 
stead of thinking them out, and these enormous 
changes are still but imperfectly apprehended. The 
trained and specialised military man probably ap- 
prehends them as feebly as any one. 

This is a thing that I want to state as emphati- 
cally as possible. It is the quintessence of the les- 
son I have learnt at the front. The whole method 
of war has been so altered in the past five and 
twenty years as to make it a new and different proc- 
ess altogether. Much the larger part of this altera- 
tion has only become effective in the last two years. 
Every one is a beginner at this new game ; every one 
is experimenting and learning. The former train- 
ing of the soldier, the established traditions of mili- 
tary ways, the mental habits of what we call in Eng- 
land " army people " no more fit them specially for 
this new game than any other sort of training. In 
so far as that former training suppressed thought ; 
in so far as the army tradition has given army peo- 
ple a disposition to assume that they are specially 
qualified for any sort of war, so far is their profes- 
sionalism a positive disadvantage. The business 
organiser, the civil engineer, the energetic man of 
general intelligence is just as likely to make a suc- 
cessful commander at this new warfare as a man of 
the old army class. This is not, I think, realised 



NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES 129 

as yet by the British as clearly as it is by the 
French. But it has been said admirably by Punch. 
That excellent picture of the old-fashioned sergeant 
who complains to his officer of the new recruit: 
" 'E's all right in the trenches, Sir ; 'e's all right at 
a scrap ; but 'e won't never make a soldier," is the 
quintessence of everything I am saying here. And 
was there not the very gravest doubts about General 
Smuts in British military circles because he had 
" had no military training "? 

The professional officer of the old dispensation 
was a man specialised in relation to some one of the 
established " arms." He was an infantry-man, a 
cavalry man, a gunner or an engineer. It will be 
interesting to trace the changes that have happened 
to all these arms. 

Before this war began speculative writers had 
argued that infantry drill in close formation had 
now no fighting value whatever, that it was no doubt 
extremely necessary for the handling, packing, for- 
warding and distribution of men, but that the ideal 
infantry fighter was now a highly individualised 
and self-reliant man put into a pit with a machine 
gun, and supported by a string of other men bring- 
ing him up supplies and ready to assist him in any 
forward rush that might be necessary. 

The opening phases of the war seemed to contra- 
dict this. It did not at first suit the German game 



130 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

to fight on this most modern theory, and isolated in- 
dividual action is uncongenial to the ordinary Ger- 
man temperament and opposed to the organised 
social tendencies of German life. To this day the 
Germans attack chiefly in close order; they are un- 
able to produce a real modern infantry for aggres- 
sive purposes, and it is a matter of astonishment 
to military minds on the English side that our 
hastily trained new armies should turn out to be 
just as good at the new fighting as the most " sea- 
soned troops." But there is no reason whatever 
why they should not be. " Leading," in the sense 
of going ahead of the men and making them move 
about mechanically at the word of command, has 
ceased. On the British side our magnificent new 
subalterns and our equally magnificent new non- 
commissioned officers play the part of captains of 
football teams; they talk their men individually 
into an understanding of the job before them ; they 
criticise style and performance. On the French 
side things have gone even farther. Every man in 
certain attacks has been given a large scale map of 
the ground over which he has to go, and has had his 
own individual job clearly marked and explained 
to him. All the Allied infantrymen tend to be- 
come specialised, as bombers, as machine gun men, 
and so on. The unspecialised common soldier, the 
infantry man who has stood and marched and 



NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES 131 

moved in ranks and ranks, the " serried lines of 
men," who are the main substance of every battle 
story for the last three thousand years, are as obso- 
lete as the dodo. The rifle and bayonet very prob- 
ably are becoming obsolete too. Knives and clubs 
and revolvers serve better in the trenches. The 
krees and the Roman sword would be as useful. 
The fine flourish of the bayonet is only possible in 
the rare infrequent open. Even then the Zulu 
assegai would serve as well. 

The two operations of the infantry attack now 
are the rush and the ''scrap." These come after 
the artillery preparation. Against the rush, the 
machine gun is pitted. The machine gun becomes 
lighter and more and more controllable by one 
man; as it does so the days of the rifle draw to a 
close. Against the machine gun we are now direct- 
ing the " Tank," which goes ahead and puts out 
the machine gun as soon as it begins to sting the in- 
fantry rush. We are also using the swooping aero- 
plane with a machine gun. Both these devices are 
of British origin, and they promise very well. 

After the rush and the scrap comes the organisa- 
tion of the captured trench. " Digging in " com- 
pletes the cycle of modern infantry fighting. You 
may consider this the first or the last phase of an 
infantry operation. It is probably at present the 
least worked-out part of the entire cycle. Here 



132 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

lies the sole German superiority; they bunch and 
crowd in the rush, they are inferior at the scrap, but 
they do dig like moles. The weakness of the British 
is their failure to settle down. They like the rush 
and the scrap; they press on too far, they get out- 
flanked and lost " in the blue " ; they are not nat- 
urally clever at the excavating part of the work, 
and they are not as yet well-trained in making dug- 
outs and shelter-pits rapidly and intelligently. 
They display most of the faults that were supposed 
to be most distinctively French before this war 
came to revolutionise all our conceptions of French 
character. 



Now the operations of this modern infantry, 
which unlike any preceding infantry in the history 
of war does not fight in disciplined formations but 
as highly individualised specialists, are determined 
almost completely by the artillery preparation. 
Artillery is now the most essential instrument of 
war. You may still get along with rather bad in- 
fantry ; you may still hold out even after the loss of 
the aerial ascendency, but so soon as your guns fail 
you approach defeat. The backbone process of the 
whole art of war is the manufacture in overwhelm- 
ing quantities, the carriage and delivery of shell 
upon the vulnerable points of the enemy's positions. 



NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES 133 

That is, so to speak, the essential blow. Even the 
infantry man is now hardly more than the residuary 
legatee after the guns have taken their toll. 

I have now followed nearly every phase in the 
life history of a shell from the moment when it is a 
segment of steel bar just cut off, to the moment 
when it is no more than a few dispersed and rusting 
rags and fragments of steel — pressed upon the 
stray visitor to the battlefield as souvenirs. All 
good factories are intensely interesting places to 
visit, but a good munition factory is romantically 
satisfactory. It is as nearly free from the antag- 
onism of employer and employed as any factory 
can be. The busy sheds I visited near Paris struck 
me as being the most living and active things in the 
entire war machine. Everywhere else I saw fitful 
activity, or men waiting. I have seen more men 
sitting about and standing about, more bored in- 
activity, during my tour than I have ever seen be- 
fore in my life. Even the front line trenches seem 
to slumber ; the Angel of Death drowses over them, 
and moves in his sleep to crush out men's lives. 
The gunfire has an indolent intermittance. But the 
munition factories grind on night and day, grind- 
ing against the factories in Central Europe, grind- 
ing out the slow and costly and necessary victory 
that may end aggressive warfare in the world for 
ever. 



134 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

It would be very interesting if one could arrange 
a meeting between any typical Allied munition 
maker on the one hand, and the Kaiser and Hinden- 
burg, those two dominant efiflgies in the German na- 
tionalists' dream of " world might." Or failing 
that, Mr. Dyson might draw the encounter. You 
imagine these two heroic figures got up for the in- 
terview, very magnificent in shining helms and 
flowing cloaks, decorations, splendid swords, spurs. 
" Here," one would say, " is the power that has 
held you. You were bolstered up very loyally by 
the Krupp firm and so forth, you piled up shell, 
guns, war material, you hoped to snatch your vic- 
tory before the industrialism and invention of the 
world could turn upon you. But you failed. You 
were not rapid enough. The battle of the Marne 
was your misfortune. And Ypres. You lost some 
chances at Ypres. Two can play at destructive in- 
dustrialism, and now we out-gun you. We are pil- 
ing up munitions now faster than you. The essen- 
tials of this Game of the War Lord are idiotically 
simple, but it was not of our choosing. It is now 
merely a question of months before you make your 
inevitable admission. This gentleman in the 
bowler hat is the victor. Sire; not you. Assisted, 
Sire, by these disrespectful-looking factory girls in 
overalls." 

For example, there is M. Citroen. Before the 



NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES 135 

war I understand he made automobiles; after the 
war he wants to turn to and make automobiles 
again. For the duration of the war he makes shell. 
He has been temporarily diverted from constructive 
to destructive industrialism. He did me the hon- 
ours of his factory. He is a compact, active man in 
dark clothes and a bowler hat, with a pencil and 
notebook conveniently at hand. He talked to me 
in carefully easy French, and watched my face with 
an intelligent eye through his pince-nez for the signs 
of comprehension. Then he went on to the next 
point. 

He took me through every stage of his process. 
In his oflflce he showed me the general story. Here 
were photographs of certain vacant fields and old 
sheds — " this place " — he indicated the altered 
prospect from the window — " at the outbreak of the 
war." He showed me a plan of the first under- 
taking. " Now we have rather over nine thousand 
work-people." 

He showed me a little row of specimens. " These 
we make for Italy. These go to Russia. These 
are the Rumanian pattern." 

Thence to the first stage, the chopping up of the 
iron bars, the furnace, the punching out of the first 
shape of the shell; all this is men's work. I had 
seen this sort of thing before in peace ironworks, 
but I saw it again with the same astonishment, the 



136 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

absolute precision of movement on the part of the 
half-naked sweating men, the calculated efficiency 
of each worker, the apparent heedlessness, the real 
certitude, with which the blazing hot cylinder is 
put here, dropped there, rolls to its next appointed 
spot, is chopped up and handed on, the swift passage 
to the cooling crude, pinkish-purple shell shape. 
Down a long line one sees in perspective a practical 
symmetry, of furnace and machine group and the 
shells marching on from this first series of phases to 
undergo the long succession of operations, machine 
after machine, across the great width of the shed 
in which eighty per cent, of the workers are women. 
There is a thick dust of sounds in the air, a rumble 
of shafting, sudden thuddings, clankings, and M. 
Citroen has to raise his voice. He points out where 
he has made little changes in procedure, cut out 
some wasteful movement. ... He has an idea and 
makes a note in the ever-ready notebook. 

There is beauty about all these women, there is 
extraordinary grace in their finely adjusted move- 
ments. I have come from an after-lunch coffee 
upon the boulevards and from watching the ugly 
fashion of our time ; it is a relief to be reminded that 
most women can after all be beautiful — if only 
they would not " dress." These women wear simple 
overalls and caps. In the cap is a rosette. Each 
shed has its own colour of rosette. 



NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES 137 

"There is much esprit de corps here," says M. 
Citroen. 

" And also," he adds, showing obverse as well as 
reverse of the world's problem of employment and 
discipline, " we can see at once if a woman is not 
in her proper shed." 

Across the great sheds under the shafting — how 
fine it must look at night ! — the shells march, are 
shaped, cut, fitted with copper bands, calibrated, 
polished, varnished. ... 

Then we go on to another system of machines in 
which lead is reduced to plastic ribbons and cut 
into shrapnel bullets as the sweetstuff makers pull 
out and cut up sweetstuff. And thence into a war- 
ren of hot underground passages in which run the 
power cables. There is not a cable in the place 
that is not immediately accessible to the electri- 
cians. We visit the dynamos and a vast organisa- 
tion of switchboards. . . . 

These things are more familiar to M. Citroen 
than they are to me. He wants me to understand, 
but he does not realise that I would like a little 
leisure to wonder. What is interesting him just 
now, because it is the newest thing, is his method 
of paying his workers. He lifts a hand very 
gravely : " I said, what we must do is to abolish 
altogether the counting of change." 

At a certain hour, he explained, came paytime. 



138 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

The people had done; it was to his interest and 
theirs that they should get out of the works as 
quickly as possible and rest and amuse themselves. 
He watched them standing in queues at the wickets 
while inside some one counted ; so many francs, so 
many centimes. It bored him to see this useless, 
tiresome waiting. It Is abolished. Now at the 
end of each week the worker goes to a window under 
the initial of his name, and is handed a card on 
which these items have been entered : 

Balance from last week. 

So many hours at so much. 

Premiums. 
The total is so many francs, so many centimes. 
This is divided into the nearest round number, 100, 
120, 80 francs as the case may be, and a balance of 
the odd francs and centimes. The latter is car- 
ried forward to the next week's account. At the 
bottom of the card is a tear-off coupon with a 
stamp, coloured to indicate the round sum, green, 
let us say, for 100, blue for 130 francs. This is 
taken to a wicket marked 100 or 130 as the case 
may be, and there stands a cashier with his money 
in piles of 100 or 130 francs counted ready to hand ; 
he sweeps in the coupon, sweeps out the cash. 

I became interested in the worker's side of this 
organisation. I insist on seeing the entrances, the 



NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES 139 

clothes-changing places, the lavatories, and so forth 
of the organisation. As we go about we pass a 
string of electric trolleys steered by important- 
looking girls, and loaded with shell, finished as far 
as these works are concerned and on their way to 
the railway siding. We visit the hospital, for these 
works demand a medical staff. It is not only that 
men and women faint or fall ill, but there are acci- 
dents, burns, crushings, and the like. The war 
casualties begin already here, and they fall chiefly 
among the women. I saw a wounded woman with 
a bandaged face sitting very quietly in the corner. 
The women here face danger, perhaps not quite 
such obvious danger as the women who, at the next 
stage in the shell's career, make and pack the ex- 
plosives in their silk casing, but quite considerable 
risk. And they work with a real enthusiasm. 
They know they are fighting the Boches as well as 
any men. Certain of them wear Russian decora- 
tions. The women of this particular factory have 
been thanked by the Tsar, and a number of decora- 
tions were sent by him for distribution among them. 

§ 3 

The shell factory and the explosives shed stand 
level with the drill yard as the real first stage in one 
of the two essential punches in modern war. 



140 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

When one meets the shell again it is being unloaded 
from the railway truck into an ammunition dump. 
And here the work of control is much more the work 
of a good traffic manager than of the old-fashioned 
soldier. 

The dump I best remember I visited on a wet and 
rainy day. Over a great space of ground the sid- 
ings of the rail-head spread, the normal gauge rail- 
head spread out like a fan and interdigitated with 
the narrow gauge lines that go up practically to the 
guns. And also at the sides camions were loading, 
and an officer from the Midi in charge of one of 
these was being dramatically indignant at five min- 
utes' delay. Between these two sets of lines, shells 
were piled of all sizes, I should think some hundreds 
of thousands of shells altogether, wet and shining in 
the rain. French reservists, soldiers from Mada- 
gascar, and some Senegalese were busy at different 
points loading and unloading the precious freights. 
A little way away from me were despondent-look- 
ing German prisoners handling timber. All this 
dump was no more than an eddy as it were in the 
path of the shell from its birth from the steel bars 
near Paris to the accomplishment of its destiny in 
the destruction or capture of more Germans. 

And next the visitor meets the shell coming up 
upon a little trolley to the gun. He sees the gun- 
ners, as drilled and precise as the men he saw at the 



NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES 141 

forges, swing out the breech block and run the shell, 
which has met and combined with its detonators 
and various other industrial products since it left 
the main dump, into the gun. The breech closes 
like a safe door, and hides the shell from the visitor. 
It is "good-bye." He receives exaggerated warn- 
ings of the danger to his ears, stuffs his fingers into 
them and opens his mouth as instructed, hears a 
loud but by no means deafening report, and sees a 
spit of flame near the breech. Regulations of a 
severe character prevent his watching from an aero- 
plane the delivery of the goods upon the customers 
opposite. 

I have already described the method of locating 
enemy guns and so forth by photography. Many 
of the men at this work are like dentists rather than 
soldiers ; they are busy in carefully lit rooms, they 
wear white overalls, they have clean hands and 
laboratory manners. The only really romantic 
figure in the whole of this process, the only figure 
that has anything of the old soldierly swagger 
about him still, is the aviator. And, as one friend 
remarked to me when I visited the work of the Brit- 
ish flying corps, " The real essential strength of 
this arm is the organisation of its repairs. Here 
is one of the repair vans through which our machine 
guns go. It is a motor workshop on wheels. But 
at any time all this park, everything, can pack up 



142 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

and move forward like Barnum and Bailey's 
Circus. The machine guns come through this shop 
in rotation; they go out again, cleaned, repaired, 
made new again. Since we got that working we 
have heard nothing of a machine gun jamming in 
any air fight at all." . . . 

The rest of the career of the shell after it has left 
the gun one must imagine chiefly from the incom- 
ing shell from the enemy. You see suddenly a fly- 
ing up of earth and stones and anything else that is 
movable in the neighbourhood of the shell-burst, 
the instantaneous unfolding of a dark cloud of 
dust and reddish smoke, which comes very quickly 
to a certain size and then begins slowly to fray out 
and blow away. Then after seeing the cloud of 
the burst you hear the hiss of the shell's approach, 
and finally you are hit by the sound of the explo- 
sion. This is the climax and end of the life history 
of any shell that is not a dud shell. Afterwards the 
battered fuse may serve as some journalist's paper- 
weight. The rest is scrap iron. 

Such is, so to speak, the primary process of 
modern warfare. I will not draw the obvious 
pacifist moral of the intense folly of human con- 
centration upon such a process. The Germans 
willed it. We Allies have but obeyed the German 
will for warfare because we could not do otherwise, 
we have taken up this simple game of shell de- 



NEW AKMS FOR OLD ONES 143 

livery, and we are teaching them that we can play 
it better, in the hope that so we and the world may 
be freed from the German will-to-power and all 
its humiliating and disgusting consequences hence- 
forth for ever. Europe now is no more than a 
household engaged in holding up and if possible 
overpowering a monomaniac member. 



§ 4 

Now the whole of this process of the making and 
delivery of a shell, which is the main process of 
modern warfare, is one that can be far better con- 
ducted by a man accustomed to industrial organisa- 
tion or transit work than by the old type of soldier. 
This is a thing that cannot be too plainly stated or 
too often repeated. Germany nearly won this war 
because of her tremendously modern industrial re- 
sources ; but she blundered into it and she is losing 
it because she has too many men in military uni- 
form and because their tradition and interests were 
too powerful with her. All the state and glories of 
soldiering, the bright uniforms, the feathers and 
spurs, the flags, the march-past, the disciplined 
massed advance, the charge; all these are as need- 
less and obsolete now in war as the masks and 
shields of an old-time Chinese brave. Liberal- 
minded people talk of the coming dangers of mili- 



144 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

tarism in the face of events that prove conclusively 
that professional militarism is already as dead as 
Julius Caesar. What is coming is not so much the 
conversion of men into soldiers as the socialisation 
of the economic organisation of the country with a 
view to both national and international necessities. 
We do not want to turn a chemist or a photographer 
into a little figure like a lead soldier, moving me- 
chanically at the word of command, but we do want 
to make his chemistry or photography swiftly avail- 
able if the national organisation is called upon to 
fight. 

We have discovered that the modern economic 
organisation is in itself a fighting machine. It is 
so much so that it is capable of taking on and de- 
feating quite easily any merely warrior people that 
is so rash as to pit itself against it. Within the 
last sixteen years methods of fighting have been 
elaborated that have made war an absolutely hope- 
less adventure for any barbaric or non-industrial- 
ised people. In the rush of larger events few peo- 
ple have realised the significance of the rapid 
squashing of the Senussi in western Egypt, and the 
collapse of De Wet's rebellion in South Africa. 
Both these struggles would have been long, tedious 
and uncertain even in a. d. 1900. This time they 
have been, so to speak, child's play. 

Occasionally into the writer's study there come 



NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES 145 

to hand drifting fragments of the American litera- 
ture upon the question of " preparedness," and 
American papers discussing the Mexican situation. 
In none of these is there evident any very clear 
realisation of the fundamental revolution that has 
occurred in military methods during the last two 
years. It looks as if a Mexican war, for example, 
was thought of as an affair of rather imperfectly 
trained young men with rifles and horses and old- 
fashioned things like that. A Mexican war on that 
level might be as tedious as the South African war. 
But if the United States preferred to go into Mexi- 
can affairs with what I may perhaps call a 1916 
autumn outfit instead of the small 1900 outfit she 
seems to possess at present, there is no reason why 
America should not clear up any and every Mexican 
guerilla force she wanted to in a few weeks. 

To do that she would need a plant of a few hun- 
dred aeroplanes, for the most part armed with ma- 
chine guns, and the motor repair vans and so forth 
needed to go with the aeroplanes, she would need a 
comparatively small army of infantry armed with 
machine guns, with motor transport, and a few 
small land ironclads with three-inch guns. Of 
course all the ground automobiles would be pro- 
vided with the caterpillar wheels that have been 
worked out by the British experiments in the pres- 
ent war, and which enable them to negotiate nearly 



146 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

every sort of ground. Such a force could locate, 
overtake, destroy and disperse any possible force 
that a country in the present industrial condition 
of Mexico could put into the field. No sort of en- 
trenchment or fortification possible in Mexico could 
stand against it. It could go from one end of the 
country to the other without serious loss, and hunt 
down and capture any one it wished. . . . 

The practical political consequence of the pres- 
ent development of warfare, of the complete revolu- 
tion in the conditions of warfare since this century 
began, is to make war absolutely hopeless for any 
peoples not able either to manufacture or procure 
the very complicated appliances and munitions now 
needed for its prosecution. Countries like Mexico, 
Bulgaria, Serbia, Afghanistan or Abyssinia are no 
more capable of going to war without the conniv- 
ance and help of manufacturing states than horses 
are capable of flying. And this makes possible such 
a complete control of war by the few great states 
which are in the necessary state of industrial de- 
velopment as not the most Utopian of us have 
hitherto dared to imagine. 



§ 5 

Infantrymen with automobile transport, plenti- 
ful machine guns. Tanks and such-like accessories ; 



NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES 147 

that is the first Arm in modern war. The factory 
hand and all the material of the shell route from 
the factory to the gun constitute the second Arm. 
Thirdly comes the artillery, the guns and the photo- 
graphic aeroplanes working with the guns. Next 
I suppose we must count Sappers and Miners as a 
fourth Arm of greatly increased importance. The 
fifth and last combatant Arm is the modern sub- 
stitute for cavalry; and that also is essentially a 
force of aeroplanes supported by automobiles. 
Several of the French leaders with whom I talked 
seemed to be convinced that the horse is absolutely 
done with in modern warfare. There is nothing, 
they declared, that cavalry ever did that cannot 
now be done better by aeroplane. 

This is something to break the hearts of the Prus- 
sian junkers and of old-fashioned British army 
people. The hunt across the English countryside, 
the preservation of the fox as a sacred animal, the 
race meeting, the stimulation of betting in all 
classes of the public; all these things depend ulti- 
mately upon the proposition that the " breed of 
horses " is of vital importance to the military 
strength of Great Britain. But if the arguments 
of these able French soldiers are sound, the cult of 
the horse ceases to be of any more value to England 
than the elegant activities of the Toxophilite So- 
ciety. Moreover, there has been a colossal buying 



148 ITALY, PRANCE AND BRITAIN 



of horses for the British army, a tremendous or- 
ganisation for the purchase and supply of fodder, 
tlien employment of tens of thousands of men as 
grooms, minders and the like, who would otherwise 
have been in the munition factories or the trenches. 
On the hypothesis of my French friends this has 
been a mere waste of men and money. Behind the 
British front I motored for miles, passing just one 
single swollen stream of cavalry. This is, these 
theorists allege, not only a useless but a dangerous 
force. It may very easily get into disastrous trou- 
ble. 

They ask to what possible use can cavalry be put? 
Can it be used in attack? Not against trenches; 
that is better done by infantrymen following up 
gunfire. Can it be used against broken infantry 
in the open? Not if the enemy has one or two 
machine guns covering their retreat. Against ex- 
posed infantry the swooping aeroplane with a ma- 
chine gun is far more deadly and more difficult to 
hit. Behind it your infantry can follow to receive 
surrenders; in most circumstances they can come 
up on cycles if it is a case of getting up quickly 
across a wide space. Similarly for pursuit the use 
of wire and use of the machine gun has abolished 
the possibility of a pouring cavalry charge. The 
swooping aeroplane does everything that cavalry 
can do in the way of disorganising the enemy, and 



NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES 149 

far more than it can do in the way of silencing ma- 
chine guns. It can capture guns in retreat much 
more easily by bombing traction engines and com- 
ing down low and shooting horses and men. An 
ideal modern pursuit would be an advance of guns, 
automobiles full of infantry, motor cyclists and 
cyclists, behind a high screen of observation aero- 
planes and a low screen of bombing and fighting 
aeroplanes. Cavalry might advance across fields 
and so forth, but only as a very accessory part of 
the general advance. . . . 

And what else is there for the cavalry to do? 

It may be argued that horses can go over country 
that is impossible for automobiles. That is to ig- 
nore altogether what has been done in this war by 
such devices as caterpillar wheels. So far from 
cavalry being able to negotiate country where ma- 
chines would stick and fail, mechanism can now 
ride over places where any horse would flounder. 

I submit these considerations to the horse-lover. 
They are not my original observations; they have 
been put to me and they have convinced me. Ex- 
cept perhaps as a parent of transport mules I see 
no further part henceforth for the horse to play in 
war. 



150 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

§ 6 

The form and texture of the coming warfare — 
if there is still warfare to come — are not yet to be 
seen in their completeness upon the modern battle- 
field. One swallow does not make a summer, nor 
a handful of aeroplanes, a " Tank " or so, a few 
acres of shell craters, and a village here and there, 
pounded out of recognition, do more than fore- 
shadow the spectacle of modernised war on land. 
War by these developments has become the mo- 
nopoly of the five great industrial powers; it is 
their alternative to end or evolve it, and if they con- 
tinue to disagree, then it must needs become a spec- 
tacle of majestic horror such as no man can yet 
conceive. It has been wise of Mr. Pennell there- 
fore, who has recently been drawing his impres- 
sions of the war upon stone, to make his pictures 
not upon the battlefield, but among the huge indus- 
trial apparatus that is thrusting behind and thrust- 
ing up through the war of the gentlemen in spurs. 
He gives us the splendours and immensities of forge 
and gun pit, furnace and mine shaft. He shows 
you how great they are and how terrible. Among 
them go the little figures of men, robbed of all 
dominance, robbed of all individual quality. He 
leaves it for you to draw the obvious conclusion 
that presently if we cannot contrive to put an end 



NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES 151 

to war, blacknesses like these, enormities and flares 
and towering threats, will follow in the track of the 
Tanks and come trampling over the bickering con- 
fusion of mankind. 

There is something very striking in these insig- 
nificant and incidental men that Mr. Pennell shows 
ns. Nowhere does a man dominate in all these 
wonderful pictures. You may argue perhaps that 
that is untrue to the essential realities; all this 
array of machine and workshop, all this marshalled 
power and purpose, has been the creation of in- 
ventor and business organiser. But are we not a 
little too free with that word ^'creation"? Fal- 
staff was a " creation " perhaps or the Sistine 
sibyls ; there we have indubitably an end conceived 
and sought and achieved; but did these inventors 
and business organisers do more than heed certain 
unavoidable imperatives? Seeking coal they were 
obliged to mine in a certain way ; seeking steel they 
had to do this and this and not that and that; 
seeking profit they had to obey the imperative of 
economy. So little did they plan their ends that 
most of these manufacturers speak with a kind of 
astonishment of the deadly use to which their works 
are put. They find themselves making the new 
war as a man might wake out of some drugged 
condition to find himself strangling his mother. 

So that Mr. Pennell's sketchy and transient hu- 



152 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

man figures seem altogether right to me. He sees 
these forges, workshops, cranes and the like, as 
inhuman and as wonderful as cliffs or great caves 
or icebergs or the stars. They are a new aspect of 
the logic of physical necessity that made all these 
older things, and he seizes upon the majesty and 
beauty of their dimensions with an entire impar- 
tiality. And they are as impartial. Through all 
these lithographs runs one present motif, the motif 
of the supreme effort of western civilisation to save 
itself and the world from the dominance of the re- 
actionary German Imperialism that has seized the 
weapons and resources of modern science. The 
pictures are arranged to shape out the life of a 
shell, from the mine to the great gun ; nothing re- 
mains of their history to show except the ammuni- 
tion dump, the gun in action and the shell-burst. 
Upon this theme all these great appearances are 
strung to-day. But to-morrow they may be strung 
upon some other and nobler purpose. These gigan- 
tic beings of which the engineer is the master and 
slave, are neither benevolent nor malignant. To- 
day they produce destruction, they are the slaves 
of the spur; to-morrow we hope they will bridge 
and carry and house and help again. 

For that peace we struggle against the dull in- 
flexibility of the German Will-to-Power. 



V 

TANKS 

§ 1 

It is the British who have produced the " land iron- 
clad" since I returned from France, and used it 
apparently with very good effect. I felt no little 
chagrin at not seeing them there, because I have a 
peculiar interest in these contrivances. It would 
be more than human not to claim a little in this 
matter. I described one in a story in The Strand 
Magazine in 1903, and my story could stand in 
parallel columns beside the first account of these 
monsters in action given by Mr. Beach Thomas or 
Mr. Philip Gibbs. My friend M. Joseph Keinach 
has successfully passed off long extracts from my 
story as descriptions of the Tanks upon British 
officers who had just seen them. The filiation was 
indeed quite traceable. They were my grandchil- 
dren — I felt a little like King Lear when first I 
read about them. Yet let me state at once that I 
was certainly not their prime originator. I took 
up an idea, manipulated it slightly, and handed it 
on. The idea was suggested to me by the con- 

153 



154 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

trivances of a certain Mr. Diplock, whose " ped- 
rail " notion, the notion of a wheel that was some- 
thing more than a wheel, a wheel that would take 
locomotives up hill-sides and over ploughed fields, 
was public property nearly twenty years ago. Pos- 
sibly there were others before Diplock. To the 
Ped-rail also Commander Murray Sueter, one of 
the many experimentalists upon the early tanks, 
admits his indebtedness, and it would seem that 
Mr. Diplock was actually concerned in the earlier 
stage of the tanks. 

Since my return I have been able to see the Tank 
at home, through the courtesy of the Ministry of 
Munitions. They have progressed far beyond any 
recognisable resemblance to the initiatives of Mr. 
Diplock; they have approximated rather to the 
American caterpillar. As I suspected when first 
I heard of these devices, the War Office and the old 
army people had practically nothing to do with 
their development. They took to them very re- 
luctantly — as they have taken to every novelty in 
this war. One brilliant general scrawled over an 
early proposal the entirely characteristic comment 
that it was a pity the inventor could not use his 
imagination to better purpose. (That foolish Brit- 
ish trick of sneering at " imagination " has cost us 
hundreds of thousands of useless casualties, and 
may yet lose us the war.) The Tanks were first 



TANKS 155 

mooted at the front about a year and a half ago; 
Mr, Winston Churchill was then asking questions 
about their practicability; he filled many simple 
souls with terror; they thought him a most dan- 
gerous lunatic. The actual making of the Tanks 
arose as an irregular side development of the 
armoured-car branch of the Koyal Naval Air Serv- 
ice work. The names most closely associated with 
the work are (I quote a reply of Dr. Macnamara's 
in the House of Commons) Mr. d'Eyncourt, the Di- 
rector of Naval Construction, Mr. W. O. Tritton, 
Lieut. Wilson, R.N.A.S., Mr. Bussell, Lieut. Stern, 
R.N.A.S., who is now Colonel Stern, Captain 
Symes, and Mr. P. Skeens. There are many other 
claims too numerous to mention in detail. 

But however much the Tanks may disconcert the 
gallant Colonel Newcomes who throw an air of re- 
straint over our victorious front, there can be no 
doubt that they are an important as well as a novel 
development of the modern offensive. Of course 
neither the Tanks nor their very obvious next de- 
velopments are going to wrest the decisive pre- 
eminence from the aeroplane. The aeroplane re- 
mains now more than ever the instrument of victory 
upon the western front. Aerial ascendency, prop- 
erly utilised, is victory. But the mobile armoured 
big gun and the Tank as a machine-gun silencer 
must enormously facilitate an advance against the 



156 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

blinded enemy. Neither of them can advance 
against properly aimed big gun fire. That has to 
be disposed of before they make their entrance. It 
remains the function of the aeroplane to locate the 
hostile big guns and to direct the tir-de-demolition 
upon them before the advance begins — possibly 
even to bomb them out. But hitherto, after the de- 
struction or driving back of the defender's big guns 
has been effected, the dug-out and machine gun 
have still inflicted heavy losses upon the advancing 
infantry until the fight is won. So soon as the big 
guns are out, the tanks will advance, destroying 
machine guns, completing the destruction of the 
wire, and holding prisoners immobile. Then the 
infantry will follow to gather in the sheaves. Mul- 
titudinously produced and — I write it with a de- 
fiant eye on Colonel Newcome — properly handled, 
these land ironclads are going to do very great 
things in shortening the war, in pursuit, in break- 
ing up the retreating enemy. Given the air as- 
cendency, and I am utterly unable to imagine any 
way of conclusively stopping or even greatly de- 
laying an offensive thus equipped. 



§ 2 

The young of even the most horrible beasts have 
something piquant and engaging about them, and 



TANKS 157 

so I suppose it is in the way of things that the land 
ironclad which opens a new and more dreadful and 
destructive phase in the human folly of warfare, 
should appear first as if it were a joke. Never has 
any such thing so completely masked its wickedness 
under an appearance of genial silliness. The Tank 
is a creature to which one naturally flings a pet 
name ; the five or six I was shown wandering, root- 
ing and climbing over obstacles, round a large 
field near X, were as amusing and disarming as a 
litter of lively young pigs. 

At first the War Office prevented the publication 
of any pictures or descriptions of these contriv- 
ances except abroad; then abruptly the embargo 
was relaxed and the press was flooded with photo- 
graphs. The reader will be familiar now with their 
appearance. They are like large slugs with an un- 
derside a little like the flattened rockers of a rock- 
ing-horse, slugs between 20 and 40 feet long. They 
are like flat-sided slugs, slugs of spirit, w^ho raise 
an enquiring snout, like the snout of a dogfish, into 
the air. They crawl upon their bellies in a way 
that would be tedious to describe to the general 
reader and unnecessary to describe to the enquiring 
specialist. They go over the ground with the slid- 
ing speed of active snails. Behind them trail two 
wheels, supporting a flimsy tail, wheels that strike 
one as incongruous as if a monster began kangaroo 



158 ITALY, FEANCE AND BRITAIN 

and ended doll's perambulator. (These wheels an- 
noy me.) They are not steely monsters; they are 
painted the drab and unassuming colours that are 
fashionable in modern warfare, so that the armour 
seems rather like the integument of a rhinoceros. 
At the sides of the head project armoured cheeks, 
and from above these stick out guns that look like 
stalked eyes. That is the general appearance of 
the contemporary tank. 

It slides on the ground; the silly little wheels 
that so detract from the genial bestiality of its ap- 
pearance dandle and bump behind it. It swings 
round about its axis. It comes to an obstacle, a 
low wall let us say, or a heap of bricks, and sets to 
work to climb with its snout. It rears over the 
obstacle, it raises its straining belly, it overhangs 
more' and more, and at last topples forward; it 
sways upon the heap and then goes plunging down- 
wards, sticking out the weak counterpoise of its 
wheeled tail. If it comes to a house or a tree or a 
wall or such-like obstruction it rams against it so 
as to bring all its weight to bear upon it — it 
weighs some tons — and then climbs over the 
debris. I saw it, and incredulous soldiers of ex- 
perience watched it at the same time, cross trenches 
and wallow amazingly through muddy exaggera- 
tions of shell holes. Then I repeated the tour in- 
side. 



TANKS 159 

Again the Tank is like the slug. The slug, as 
every biological student knows, is unexpectedly 
complicated inside. The Tank is as crowded with 
inward parts as a battleship. It is filled with en- 
gines, guns and ammunition, and in the interstices 
men. 

" You will smash your hat," said Colonel Stern. 
" No ; keep it on, or else you will smash your head." 

Only Mr. C. K. W. Nevinson could do justice to 
the interior of a Tank. You see a hand gripping 
something; you see the eyes and forehead of an 
engineer's face ; you perceive that an overall bluish- 
ness beyond the engine is the back of another man. 
" Don't hold that," says some one. " It is too hot. 
Hold on to that." The engines roar, so loudly that 
I doubt whether one could hear guns without; the 
floor begins to slope and slopes until one seems to be 
at forty-five degrees or thereabouts ; then the whole 
concern swings up and sways and slants the other 
w^ay. You have crossed a bank. You heel side- 
ways. Through the door which has been left open 
you see the little group of engineers, staff officers 
and naval men receding and falling away behind 
you. You straighten up and go up hill. You halt 
and begin to rotate. Through the open door, the 
green field with its red walls, rows of worksheds 
and forests of chimneys in the background, begins 
a steady processional movement. The group of 



160 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

engineers and officers and naval men appears at the 
other side of the door and further off. Then comes 
a sprint down hill. You descend and stretch your 
legs. 

About the field other Tanks are doing their 
stunts. One is struggling in an apoplectic way in 
the mud pit with a cheek half buried. It noses its 
way out and on with an air of animal relief. 

They are like jokes by Heath Robinson. One 
forgets that these things have already saved the 
lives of many hundreds of our soldiers and smashed 
and defeated thousands of Germans. 

Said one soldier to me : " In the old attacks you 
used to see the British dead lying outside the ma- 
chine gun emplacements like birds outside a butt 
with a good shot inside. iSlow, these things walk 
through." 



I saw other things that day at X. The Tank is 
only a beginning in a new phase of warfare. Of 
these other things I may only write in the most 
general terms. 

But though Tanks and their collaterals are being 
made upon a very considerable scale in X, already 
I realised as I walked through gigantic forges as 
high and marvellous as cathedrals, and from work- 
shed to workshed where gun carriages, ammuni- 



TANKS 161 

tion carts and a hundred such things were flowing 
into existence with the swelling abundance of a 
river that flows out of a gorge, that as the demand 
for the new developments grows clear and strong, 
the resources of Britain are capable still of a tre- 
mendous response. If only we do not roh these 
great factories and works of their men. 

Upon this question certain things need to be said 
very plainly. The decisive factor in the sort of 
war we are now waging is the production and right 
use of mechanical material ; victory in this war de- 
pends now upon three things, the aeroplane, the 
gun, and the Tank developments. These — and 
not crowds of men — are the prime necessity for a 
successful offensive. Every man we draw from 
munition making to the ranks brings our western 
condition nearer to the military condition of Rus- 
sia. In these things we may be easily misled by 
military " experts." We have to remember that 
the military " expert " is a man who learnt his 
business before 1914, and that the business of war 
has been absolutely revolutionised since 1914; the 
military expert is a man trained to think of war as 
essentially an affair of cavalry, infantry in forma- 
tion, and field guns, whereas cavalry is entirely 
obsolete, infantry no longer fights in formation, 
and the methods of gunnery have been entirely 
changed. The military man I observe still runs 



162 ITALY, FEANCE AND BKITAIN 

about the world in spurs, he travels in trains in 
spurs, he walks in spurs, he thinks in terms of 
spurs. He has still to discover that it is about as 
ridiculous for a soldier to go about in spurs to-day 
as if he were to carry a crossbow. I take it these 
spurs are only the outward and visible sign of an 
inw^ard obsolescence. The disposition of the mili- 
tary " expert " is still to think too little of machin- 
ery and to demand too much of the men. He makes 
irrational demands for men and for the wrong sort 
of men. Behind our front at the time of my visit 
there were, for example, many thousands of cav- 
alry, men tending horses, men engaged in trans- 
porting bulky fodder for horses and the like. 
These men were doing about as much in this war 
as if they had been at Timbuctoo. Every man who 
is taken from munition mailing at X to spur-wor- 
shipping in khaki, is a dead loss to the military 
efficiency of the country. Every man that is needed 
or is likely to be needed for the actual operations 
of modern warfare can be got by combing out the 
cavalry, the brewing and distilling industries, the 
theatres and music halls, and the like unproductive 
occupations. The understaffing of munition works, 
the diminution of their efficiency by the use of aged 
and female labour, is the straight course to failure 
in this war. 

In X, in the forges and machine shops, I saw al- 



TANKS 163 

ready too large a proportion of boys and grey heads. 

War is a thing that changes very rapidly, and we 
have in the Tanks only the first of a great series of 
offensive developments. They are bound to be im- 
proved, at a great pace. The method of using them 
will change very rapidly. Any added invention 
will necessitate the scrapping of old types and the 
production of the new patterns in quantity. It is 
of supreme necessity to the Allies if they are to win 
this war outright that the lead in inventions and 
enterprise which the British have won over the 
Germans in this matter should be retained. It is 
our game now to press the advantage for all it is 
worth. We have to keep ahead to win. We can- 
not do so unless we have unstinted men and un- 
stinted material to produce each new development 
as its use is realised. 

Given that much, the Tank will enormously en- 
hance the advantage of the new offensive method 
on the French front; the method, that is, of gun 
demolition after aerial photography, followed by 
an advance; it is a huge addition to our prospect 
of decisive victory. What does it do? It solves 
two problems. The existing Tank affords a means 
of advancing against machine gun fire and of de- 
stroying wire and machine guns without much risk 
of loss, so soon as the big guns have done their duty 
by the enemy guns. And also behind the Tank it- 



164 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 



self, it is useless to conceal, lies the possibility of 
bringing up big guns and big gun ammunition, 
across nearly any sort of country, as fast as the 
advance can press forward. Hitherto every ad- 
vance has paid a heavy toll to the machine gun, and 
every advance has had to halt after a couple of 
miles or so while the big guns (taking five or six 
days for the job) toiled up to the new positions. 



It is impossible to restrain a note of sharp 
urgency from what one has to say about these de- 
velopments. The Tanks remove the last technical 
difficulties in our way to decisive victory and a 
permanent peace; they also afford a reason for 
straining every nerve to bring about a decision and 
peace soon. At the risk of seeming an imaginative 
alarmist I would like to point out the reasons these 
things disclose for hurrying this war to a decision 
and doing our utmost to arrange the world's affairs 
so as to make another war improbable. Already 
these serio-comic Tanks, weighing something over 
twenty tons or so, have gone slithering and sliding 
over dead and wounded men. That is not an inci- 
dent for sensitive minds to dwell upon, but it is a 
mere little child's play anticipation of what the 



TANKS 165 

big land ironclads that are hound to come if there 
is no world pacification, are going to do. 

What lies behind the Tank depends upon this 
fact; there is no definable upward limit of mass. 
Upon that I would lay all the stress possible, be- 
cause everything turns upon that. 

You cannot make a land ironclad so big and 
heavy but that you cannot make a caterpillar track 
wide enough and strong enough to carry it forward. 
Tanks are quite possible that will carry twenty -inch 
or twenty-five inch guns, besides minor armament. 
Such Tanks may be undesirable; the production 
may exceed the industrial resources of any empire 
to produce; but there is no inherent impossibility 
in such things. There are not even the same limi- 
tations as to draught and docking accommodation 
that set bounds to the size of battleships. It fol- 
lows, therefore, as a necessary deduction that if 
the world's affairs are so left at the end of the war 
that the race of armaments continues, the Tank, 
which at present weighs under twenty tons, will 
develop steadily into a tremendous instrument of 
warfare, driven by engines of scores of thousands 
of horse-power, tracking on a track scores of hun- 
dreds of yards wide and weighing hundreds or 
thousands of tons. Nothing but a world agreement 
not to do so can prevent this logical development 



166 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

of the land ironclad. Such a structure will make 
wheel-ruts scores of feet deep; it will plough up, 
devastate and destroy the country it passes over 
altogether. 

For my own part I never imagined the land iron- 
clad idea would get loose into war. I thought that 
the military intelligence was essentially unimag- 
inative, and that such an aggressive military power 
as Germany, dominated by military people, would 
never produce anything of the sort. I thought that 
this war would be fought out without Tanks and 
that then war would come to an end. For of 
course it is mere stupidity that makes people doubt 
the ultimate ending of war. I have been so far 
justified in these expectations of mine, that it is 
not from military sources that these things have 
come. They have been thrust upon the soldiers 
from without. But now that they are loose, now 
that they are in war, we have to face their full pos- 
sibilities, to use our advantage in them and press 
on to the end of the war. In support of a photo- 
aero directed artillery, even our present Tanks can 
be used to complete an invincible offensive. We 
shall not so much push as ram. It is doubtful if 
the Germans can get anything of the sort into 
action before six months are out, and by that time 
we should be using vastly more formidable Tanks 
than those we are making now. We ought to get 



TANKS 167 

the war on to German soil before the Tanks have 
grown to more than three or four times their pres- 
ent size. Then it will not matter so much how 
much bigger they grow. It will be the German 
landscape that will suffer. 

After one has seen the actual Tanks it is not 
very difficult to close one's eyes and figure the sort 
of Tank that may be arguing with Germany in a 
few months' time about the restoration of Belgium 
and Serbia and France, the restoration of the 
sunken tonnage, the penalties of the various Zeppe- 
lin and submarine murders, the freedom of seas 
and land alike from piracy, the evacuation of 
Poland, including Posen, and the guarantees for 
the future peace of Europe. The machine will be 
perhaps as big as a destroyer and more heavily 
armed and equipped. It will swim over and 
through the soil at a pace of ten or twelve miles an 
hour. In front of it will be corn land, neat woods, 
orchards, pasture, gardens, villages and towns. It 
will advance upon its belly with a swaying motion, 
devouring the ground beneath it. Behind it masses 
of soil and rock, lumps of turf, splintered wood, 
bits of houses, occasional streaks of red, will drop 
from its track, and it will leave a wake, six or seven 
times as wide as a high road, from which all soil, 
all cultivation, all semblance to cultivated or cul- 
tivatable land will have disappeared. It will not 



168 ITALY, FEANCE AND BRITAIN 

even be a track of soil. It will be a track of sub- 
soil laid bare. It will be a flayed strip of nature. 
In the course of its fighting the monster may have 
to turn about. It will then halt and spin slowly 
round, grinding out an arena of desolation with a 
circumference equal to its length. If it has to re- 
treat and advance again these streaks and holes 
of destruction will increase and multiply. Behind 
the fighting line these monsters will manoeuvre to 
and fro, destroying the land for all ordinary agri- 
cultural purposes for ages to come. The first imag- 
inative account of the land ironclad that was ever 
written concluded with the words, " They are the 
reductio ad ahsurdum of war." They are, and it is 
to the engineers, the ironmasters, the workers and 
the inventive talent of Great Britain and France 
that we must look to ensure that it is in Germany, 
the great teacher of war, that this demonstration 
of war's ultimate absurdity is completed. 

For forty years Frankenstein Germany invoked 
war, turned every development of material and so- 
cial science to aggressive ends, and at last when she 
felt the time was ripe she let loose the new monster 
that she had made of war to cow the spirit of man- 
kind. She set the thing tramping through Bel- 
gium. She cannot grumble if at last it comes home, 
stranger and more dreadful even than she made it, 



TANKS 169 

trampling the German towns and fields with Ger- 
man blood upon it and its eyes towards Berlin. 

This logical development of the Tank idea may 
seem a gloomy prospect for mankind. But it is 
open to question whether the tremendous develop- 
ment of warfare that has gone on in the last two 
years does after all open a prospect of unmitigated 
gloom. There has been a good deal of cheap and 
despondent sneering recently at the phrase, " The 
war that will end war." It is still possible to 
maintain that that may be a correct description of 
this war. It has to be remembered that war, as 
the aeroplane and the Tank have made it, has al- 
ready become an impossible luxury for any barbaric 
uncivilised people. War on the grade that has been 
achieved on the Somme predicates an immense in- 
dustrialism behind it. Of all the States in the 
world only four can certainly be said to be fully 
capable of sustaining war at the level to which it 
has now been brought upon the Western Front. 
These are Britain, France, Germany, and the 
United States of America. Less certainly equal to 
the effort are Italy, Japan, Russia, and Austria. 
These eight powers are the only powers in the world 
capable of warfare under modern conditions. Five 
are already Allies and one is incurably pacific. 
There is no other power or people in the world that 



170 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

can go to war now without the consent and con- 
nivance of these great powers. If we consider their 
alliances, we may count it that the matter rests now 
between two groups of Allies and one neutral 
power. So that while on the one hand the devel- 
opment of modern warfare of which the Tank is 
the present symbol opens a prospect of limitless 
senseless destruction, it opens on the other hand a 
prospect of organised world control. This Tank 
development must ultimately bring the need of a 
real permanent settlement within the compass of 
the meanest of diplomatic intelligences. A peace 
that will restore competitive armaments has now 
become a less desirable prospect for every one than 
a continuation of the war. Things were bad 
enough before when the land forces were still in a 
primitive phase of infantry, cavalry and artillery, 
and when the only real race to develop monsters 
and destructors was for sea power. But the race 
for sea power before 1914 was mere child's play 
to the breeding of engineering monstrosities for 
land warfare that must now follow any indetermi- 
nate peace settlement. I am no blind believer in 
the wisdom of mankind, but I cannot believe that 
men are so insensate and headstrong as to miss the 
plain omens of the present situation. 

So that after all the cheerful amusement the sight 
of a Tank causes may not be so very unreasonable. 



TANKS 171 

These things may be no more than one of these 
penetrating flashes of wit that will sometimes light 
up and dispel the contentions of an angry man. If 
they are not that then they are the grimmest jest 
that ever set men grinning. Wait and see, if you 
do not believe me. 



HOW PEOPLE THINK ABOUT THE 
WAR 



DO THEY REALLY THINK AT ALL? 

All human affairs are mental affairs; the bright 
ideas of to-day are the realities of to-morrow. 
The real history of mankind is the history of how 
ideas have arisen, how they have taken possession 
of men's minds, how they have struggled, altered, 
proliferated, decayed. There is nothing in this 
war at all hut a conflict of ideas, traditions, and 
mental habits. The German Will, clothed in con- 
ceptions of aggression and fortified by cynical false- 
hood, struggles against the fundamental sanity of 
the German mind and the confused protest of man- 
kind. So that the most permanently important 
thing in the tragic process of this war is the change 
of opinion that is going on. What are people 
making of it? Is it producing any great common 
understandings, any fruitful unanimities? 

No doubt it is producing enormous quantities of 
cerebration, but is it anything more than chaotic 

172 



DO THEY REALLY THINK AT ALL? 173 

and futile cerebration? We are told all sorts of 
things in answer to that, things often without a 
scrap of evidence or probability to support them. 
It is, we are assured, turning people to religion, 
making them moral and thoughtful. It is also, we 
are assured with equal confidence, turning them to 
despair and moral disaster. It will be followed by 
(1) a period of moral renascence, and (2) a de- 
bauch. It is going to make the workers (1) more 
and (2) less obedient and industrious. It is (1) 
inuring men to war and (2) filling them with a 
passionate resolve never to suffer war again. And 
so on. I propose now to ask, what is really happen- 
ing in this matter? How is human opinion chang- 
ing? I have opinions of my own and they are 
bound to colour my discussion. The reader must 
allow for that, and as far as possible I will remind 
him where necessary to make his allowance. 

Now first I would ask, is any really continuous 
and thorough mental process going on at all about 
this war? I mean, is there any considerable num- 
ber of people who are seeing it as a whole, taking 
it in as a whole, trying to get a general idea of 
it from which they can form directing conclusions 
for the future? Is there any considerable number 
of people even trying to do that? At any rate let 
me point out first that there is quite an enormous 
mass of people who — in spite of the fact that their 



174 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

minds are concentrated on aspects of this war, who 
are at present hearing, talking, experiencing little 
else than the war — are nevertheless neither doing 
nor trying to do anything that deserves to be called 
thinking about it at all. They may even be suffer- 
ing quite terribly by it. But they are no more mas- 
tering its causes, reasons, conditions, and the possi- 
bility of its future prevention than a monkey that 
has been rescued in a scorching condition from the 
burning of a house will have mastered the problem 
of a fire. It is just happening to and about them. 
It may, for anything they have learnt about it, hap- 
pen to them again. 

A vast majority of people are being swamped by 
the spectacular side of the business. It was very 
largely my fear of being so swamped myself that 
made me reluctant to go as a spectator to the front. 
I knew that my chances of being hit by a bullet were 
infinitesimal, but I was extremely afraid of being 
hit by some too vivid impression. I was afraid 
that I might see some horribly wounded man or 
some decayed dead body that would so scar my 
memory and stamp such horror into me as to reduce 
me to a mere useless, gibbering, stop-the-war-at-any- 
price pacifist. Years ago my mind was once dark- 
ened very badly for some weeks with a kind of fear 
and distrust of life through a sudden unexpected 
encounter one tranquil evening with a drowned 



DO THEY REALLY THINK AT ALL? 175 

body. But in this journey in Italy and France, 
although I have had glimpses of much death and 
seen many wounded men, I have had no really hor- 
rible impressions at all. That side of the business 
has, I think, been overwritten. The thing that 
haunts me most is the impression of a prevalent 
relapse into extreme untidiness, of a universal dis- 
comfort, of fields, and of ruined houses treated dis- 
regardfully. . . . But that is not what concerns us 
now in this discussion. What concerns us now is 
the fact that this war is producing spectacular ef- 
fects so tremendous and incidents so strange, so 
remarkable, so vivid, that the mind forgets both 
causes and consequences and simply sits down to 
stare. 

For example, there is this business of the Zep- 
pelin raids in England. It is a supremely silly 
business; it is the most conclusive demonstration 
of the intellectual inferiority of the German to the 
Western European that it should ever have hap- 
pened. There was the clearest a priori case 
against the gas-bag. I remember the discussions 
ten or twelve years ago in which it was established 
to the satisfaction of every reasonable man that 
ultimately the "heavier than air" machine (as we 
called it then) must fly better than the gas-bag, 
and still more conclusively that no gas-bag was 
conceivable that could hope to fight and defeat aero- 



176 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

planes. Nevertheless the German, with that dull 
faith of his in mere "Will," persisted along his 
line. He knew instinctively that he could not 
produce aviators to meet the Western Euro- 
pean; all his social instincts made him cling to 
the idea of a great motherly, an almost sowlike 
bag of wind above him. At an enormous waste of 
resources Germany has produced these futile mon- 
sters, that drift in the darkness over England pro- 
miscuously dropping bombs on fields and houses. 
They are now meeting the fate that was demon- 
strably certain ten years ago. If they found us 
unready for them it is merely that we were unable 
to imagine so idiotic an enterj)rise would ever be 
seriously sustained and persisted in. We did not 
believe in the probability of Zeppelin raids any 
more than we believed that Germany would force 
the world into war. It was a thing too silly to 
be believed. But they came — to their certain 
fate. In the month after I returned from France 
and Italy, no less than four of these fatuities were 
exploded and destroyed within thirty miles of my 
Essex home. . . . There in chosen phrases you have 
the truth about these things. But now mark the 
perversion of thought due to spectacular effect. 
I find over the Essex countryside, which has been 
for more than a year and a half a highway for 
Zeppelins, a new and curious admiration for them 



DO THEY REALLY THINK AT ALL? 177 

that has arisen out of these very disasters. Pre- 
viously they were regarded with dislike and a sort 
of distrust, as one might regard a sneaking neigh- 
bour who left his footsteps in one's garden at night. 
But the Zeppelins of Billericay and Potter's Bar 
are — heroic things. (The Cuflfley one came down 
too quickly, and the fourth one which came down 
for its crew to surrender is despised.) I have 
heard people describe the two former with eyes 
shining with enthusiasm. 

" First," they say, " you saw a little round red 
glow that spread. Then you saw the whole Zep- 
pelin glowing. Oh, it was beautiful! Then it 
began to turn over and come down, and it flamed 
and pieces began to break away. And then down 
it came, leaving flaming pieces all up the sky. At 
last it was a pillar of fire eight thousand feet high. 
. . . Every one said, ' Ooooo ! ' And then some one 
pointed out the little aeroplane lit up by the flare 
— such a leetle thing up there in the night! It 
is the greatest thing I have ever seen. Oh! the 
most wonderful — most wonderful ! " 

There is a feeling that the Germans really must 
after all be a splendid people to provide such mag- 
nificent pyrotechnics. 

Some people in London the other day were pre- 
tending to be shocked by an American who boasted 
he had been in " two bully bombardments," but 



178 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

he was only saying what every one feels more or 
less. We are at a spectacle that — as a spectacle 
■ — our grandchildren will envy. I understand now 
better the ^tory of the man who stared at the sparks 
raining up from his own house as it burnt in the 
night and whispered, '' Lovely! Lovely!" 

The spectacular side of the war is really an enor- 
mous distraction from thought. And against 
thought there also fights the native indolence of 
the human mind. The human mind, it seems, was 
originally developed to think about the individual ; 
it thinks reluctantly about the species. It takes 
refuge from that sort of thing if it possibly can. 
And so the second great preventive of clear think- 
ing is the tranquillising platitude. 

The human mind is an instrument very easily 
fatigued. Only a few exceptions go on thinking 
restlessly — to the extreme exasperation of their 
neighbours. The normal mind craves for deci- 
sions, even wrong or false decisions rather than 
none. It clutches at comforting falsehoods. It 
loves to be told, " There, don't you worry. That'll 
be all right. That's settled.^^ This war has come 
as an almost overwhelming challenge to mankind. 
To some of us it seems as if it were the Sphynx 
proffering the alternative of its riddle or death. 
Yet the very urgency of this challenge to think 
seems to paralyse the critical intelligence of very 



DO THEY KEALLY THINK AT ALL? 179 

many people altogether. They will say, " This war 
is going to produce enormous changes in every- 
thing." They will then subside mentally with a 
feeling of having covered the whole ground in a 
thoroughly safe manner. Or they will adopt an 
air of critical aloofness. They will say, " How is 
it possible to foretell what may happen in this tre- 
mendous sea of change? " And then, with an air 
of superior modesty, they will go on doing — what- 
ever they feel inclined to do. Many others, a de- 
gree less simple in their methods, will take some 
entirely partial aspect, arrive at some guesswork 
decision upon that, and then behave as though that 
met every question we have to face. Or they will 
make a sort of admonitory forecast that is con- 
ditional upon the good behaviour of other people. 
" Unless the Trade Unions are more reasonable," 
they will say. Or, " Unless the shipping interest 
is grappled with and controlled." Or, " Unless 
England wakes up." And with that they seem to 
wash their hands of further responsibility for the 
future. 

One delightful form of put-off is the sage remark, 
" Let us finish the war first, and then let us ask 
what is going to happen after it." One likes to 
think of the beautiful blank day after the signing 
of peace when these wise minds swing round to 
pick up their deferred problems. . . . 



180 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 



I submit that a man has not done his duty by 
himself as a rational creature unless he has formed 
an idea of what is going on, as one complicated 
process, until he has formed an idea sufficiently 
definite for him to make it the basis of a further 
idea, which is his own relationship to that process. 
He must have some notion of what the process is 
going to do to him, and some notion of what he 
means to do, if he can, to the process. That is to 
say, he must not only have an idea how the process 
is going, but also an idea of how he wants it to go. 
It seems so natural and necessary for a human 
brain to do this that it is hard to suppose that every 
one has not more or less attempted it. But few 
people, in Great Britain at any rate, have the habit 
of frank expression, and when i^eople do not seem 
to have made out any of these things for themselves 
there is a considerable element of secretiveness and 
inexpressiveness to be allowed for before we decide 
that they have not in some sort of fashion done 
so. Still, after all allowances have been made, 
there remains a vast amount of jerry-built and 
ready-made borrowed stuff in most of people's phi- 
losophies of the war. The systems of authentic 
opinion in this world of thought about the war are 
like comparatively rare thin veins of living men- 
tality in a vast world of dead repetitions and echoed 
suggestions. And that being the case, it is quite 



DO THEY REALLY THINK AT ALL? 181 

possible that history after the war like history be- 
fore the war, will not be so much a display of human 
will and purpose as a resultant of human vacil- 
lations, obstructions and inadvertencies. We shall 
still be in a drama of blind forces following the 
line of least resistance. 

One of the people who is often spoken of as if 
he were doing an enormous amount of concentra- 
ted thinking is " the man in the trenches." We 
are told — by gentlemen writing for the most part 
at home — of the most extraordinary things that 
are going on in those devoted brains, how they are 
getting new views about the duties of labour, re- 
ligion, morality, monarchy, and any other notions 
that the gentleman at home happens to fancy and 
wishes to push. Now that is not at all the impres- 
sion of the khaki mentality I have reluctantly ac- 
cepted as correct. For the most part the man in 
khaki is up against a round of tedious immediate 
duties that forbid consecutive thought; he is 
usually rather crowded and not very comfortable. 
He is bored. 

The real horror of modern war when all is said 
and done is the boredom. To get killed or wounded 
may be unpleasant, but it is at any rate interesting ; 
the real tragedy is in the desolated fields, the 
desolated houses, the desolated hours and days, the 
bored and desolated minds that hang behind the 



182 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

melee and just outside the melee. The peculiar 
beastliness of the German crime is the way the 
German war cant and its consequences have seized 
upon and paralysed the mental movement of 
Western Europe. Before 1914 war was theoreti- 
cally unpopular in every European country; we 
thought of it as something tragic and dreadful. 
Now every one knows by experience that it is some- 
thing utterly dirty and detestable. We thought 
it was the Nemean lion, and we have found it is the 
Augean stable. But being bored by war and hating 
war is quite unproductive unless you are thinking 
about its nature and causes so thorougJily that you 
will presently he able to take hold of it and control 
it and end it. It is no good for every one to say 
unanimously, " We will have no more war," unless 
you have thought out how to avoid it, and mean to 
bring that end about. It is as if every one said, 
"We will have no more catarrh," or "no more 
flies " or " no more east wind." And my point is 
that the immense sorrows at home in every Euro- 
pean country and the vast boredom of the combat- 
ants are probably not really producing any effec- 
tive remedial mental action at all, and will not 
do so unless we get much more thoroughly to work 
upon the thinking-out process. 

In such talks as I could get with men close up 
to the front I found beyond this great boredom 



DO THEY REALLY THINK AT ALL? 183 

and attempts at distraction only very specialised 
talk about changes in the future. Men were keen 
upon questions of army promotion, of the future 
conscription, of the future of the temporary officer, 
upon the education of boys in relation to army 
needs. But the war itself was bearing them all 
upon its way, as unquestioned and uncontrolled 
as if it were the planet on which they lived. 



II 



THE YIELDING PACIFIST AND THE 
CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR 



Among the minor topics that people are talking 
about behind the western fronts is the psychology 
of the Yielding Pacifist and the Conscientious 
Objector. Of course, we are all pacifists nowa- 
days; I know of no one who does not want not 
only to end this war but to put an end to war 
altogether, except those blood-red terrors, Count 
Reventlow, Mr. Leo Maxse — how he does it on a 
vegetarian dietary I cannot imagine ! — and our 
wild-eyed desperadoes of The Morning Post. But 
most of the people I meet, and most of the people 
I met on my journey, are pacifists like myself who 
want to make peace by beating the armed man un- 
til he gives in and admits the error of his ways, 
disarming him and reorganising the world for the 
forcible suppression of military adventures in the 
future. They want belligerency put into the same 
category as burglary, as a matter for forcible sup- 
pression. The Yielding Pacifist who will accept 

184 



THE YIELDING PACIFIST 185 

any sort of peace and the Conscientious Objector, 
who will not fight at all, are not of that opinion. 

Both Italy and France produce parallel types to 
those latter, but it would seem that in each case 
England displays the finer developments. The 
Latin mind is directer than the English, and its 
standards — shall I say ? — more primitive ; it gets 
more directly to the fact that here are men who 
will not fight. And it is less charitable. I was 
asked quite a number of times for the English 
equivalent of an emhusque. " We don't general- 
ise," I said, " we treat each case on its merits ! " 

One interlocutor near Udine was exercised by 
our Italian Red Cross work. 

" Here," he said, " are sixty or seventy young 
Englishmen, all fit for military service. ... Of 
course they go under fire, but it is not like being 
junior officers in the trenches. Not one of them 
has been killed or wounded." 

He reflected. " One, I think, has been decora- 
ted," he said. . . . 

My French and Italian are only for very rough 
common jobs; when it came to explaining the Con- 
scientious Objector sympathetically they broke 
down badly. I had to construct long parentheti- 
cal explanations of our antiquated legislative meth- 
ods to show how it was that the "conscientious 
objector " had been so badly defined. The for- 



186 ITALY, FKANCE AND BKITAIN 

eigner does not understand the importance of 
vague definition in British life. " Practically, of 
course, we offered to exempt any one who conscien- 
tiously objected to fight or serve. Then the Pacif- 
ist and Pro-German people started a campaign to 
enrol objectors. Of course every shirker, every 
coward and slacker in the country decided at once 
to be a conscientious objector. Any one but a 
British legislator could have foreseen that. Then 
we started Tribunals to wrangle with the objectors 
about their bona fides. Then the Pacifists and the 
Pro-Germans issued little leaflets and started cor- 
respondence courses to teach people exactly how to 
lie to the Tribunals. Trouble about the freedom 
of the pamphleteer followed. I had to admit — 
it has been rather a sloppy business. " The peo- 
ple who made the law knew their own minds, but 
we English are not an expressive people." 

These are not easy things to say in Elementary 
(and slightly Decayed) French or in Elementary 
and Corrupt Italian. 

" But why do people support the sham consci- 
entious objector and issue leaflets to help him — 
when there is so much big work clamouring to 
be done?" 

" That," I said, " is the Whig tradition." 

When they pressed me further, I said : " I am 
really the questioner. I am visiting your country. 



THE YIELDING PACIFIST 187 

and you have to tell me things. It is not right 
that I should do all the telling. Tell me all about 
Eomain Rolland." 

And also I pressed them about the official social- 
ists in Italy and the Socialist minority in France 
until i got the question out of the net of national 
comparisons and upon a broader footing. In sev- 
eral conversations we began to work out in general 
terms the psychology of those people who were 
against the war. But usually we could not get to 
that; my interlocutors would insist upon telling 
me just what they would like to do or just what 
they would like to see done to stop-the-war pacifists 
and conscientious objectors; pleasant rather than 
fruitful imaginative exercises from which I could 
effect no more than platitudinous uplifts. 

But the general drift of such talks as did seem 
to penetrate the question was this, that among these 
stop-the-war people there are really three types. 
First there is a type of person who hates violence 
and the infliction of pain under any circumstances, 
and who has a mystical belief in the rightness ( and 
usually in the efficacy) of non-resistance. These 
are generally Christians, and then their cardinal 
text is the instruction to " turn the other cheek." 
Often they are Quakers. If they are consistent 
they are vegetarians and wear Lederlos boots. 
They do not desire police protection for their goods. 



188 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

They stand aloof from all the force and conflict 
of life. They have always done so. This is an un- 
derstandable and respectable type. It has numer- 
ous Hindu equivalents. It is a type that finds little 
difficulty about exemptions — provided the indi- 
vidual has not been too recently converted' to his 
present habits. But it is not the prevalent type 
in stop-the-war circles. Such genuine ascetics do 
not number more than a thousand or so, in all three 
of our western allied countries. The mass of the 
stop-the-war people is made up of quite other ele- 
ments. 

§ 2 

In the complex structure of the modern com- 
munity there are two groups or strata or pockets 
in which the impulse of social obligation, the gre- 
garious sense of a common welfare, is at its lowest ; 
one of these is the class of the Resentful Employe, 
the class of people w^ho, without explanation, ade- 
quate preparation or any chance, have been shoved 
at an early age into uncongenial work and never 
given a chance to escape, and the other is the class 
of people with small fixed incomes or with small 
salaries earnt by routine work, or half independ- 
ent people practising some minor artistic or liter- 
ary craft, who have led uneventful, irresponsible 
lives from their youth up, and never came at any 



THE YIELDING PACIFIST 189 

point into relations of service to the state. This 
latter class was more difficult to define than the 
former — because it is more various within itself. 
My French friends wanted to talk of the " Psycho- 
logy of the Rentier." I was for such untransla- 
table phrases as the " Genteel Whig," or the " Don- 
nish Liberal." But I lit up an Italian — he is 
a Milanese manufacturer — with " these Floren- 
tine English who would keep Italy in a glass case." 
'' I know," he said. Before I go on to expand 
this congenial theme, let me deal first with the 
Resentful Employe, who is a much more consid- 
erable, and to me a much more sympathetic figure, 
in European affairs. I began life myself as a 
Resentful Employe. By the extremest good luck 
I have got my mind and spirit out of the distortions 
of that cramping beginning, but I can still recall 
even the anger of those old days. 

He becomes an employe between thirteen and 
fifteen ; he is made to do work he does not like for 
no other purpose that he can see except the profit 
and glory of a fortunate person called his employer, 
behind whom stand church and state, blessing and 
upholding the relationship. He is not allowed to 
feel that he has any share whatever in the employ- 
er's business, or that any end is served but the 
employer's profit. He cannot see that the employer 
acknowledges any duty to the state. Neither 



190 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

church nor state seem to insist that the employer 
has any public function. At no point does the 
employe come into a clear relationship of mutual 
obligation with the state. There does not seem 
to be any way out for the employe from a life 
spent in this subordinate, toilsome relationship. 
He feels put upon and cheated out of life. He 
is without honour. If he is a person of ability or 
stubborn temper he struggles out of his position; 
if he is a kindly and generous person he blames 
his " luck " and does his work and lives his life 
as cheerfully as possible — and so live the bulk 
of our amazing European workers ; if he is a being 
of great magnanimity he is content to serve for 
the ultimate good of the race; if he has imagina- 
tion he says, " Things will not always be like this," 
and becomes a socialist or a guild socialist, and 
tries to educate the employer to a sense of recip- 
rocal duty ; but if he is too human for any of these 
things, then he begins to despise and hate the em- 
ployer and the system that made him. He wants 
to hurt them. Upon that hate it is easy to trade. 
A certain section of what is called the Socialist 
press and the Socialist literature in Europe is no 
doubt great-minded; it seeks to carve a better 
world out of the present. But much of it is social- 
ist only in name. Its spirit is Anarchistic. Its 
real burthen is not construction but grievance; it 



THE YIELDING PACIFIST 191 

tells the bitter tale of the employe, it feeds and 
organises his malice, it schemes annoyance and in- 
jury for the hated employer. The state and the 
order of the world is confounded with the capi- 
talist. Before the war the popular so-called soci- 
alist press reeked with the cant of rebellion, the 
cant of any sort of rebellion. " I'm a rebel," was 
the silly boast of the young disciple. " Spoil 
something, set fire to something," was held to be 
the proper text for any girl or lad of spirit. And 
this blind discontent carried on into the war. 
While on the one hand a great rush of men poured 
into the army saying, " Thank God ! we can serve 
our country at last instead of some beastly prof- 
iteer," a sourer remnant, blind to the greater is- 
sues of the war, clung to the reasonless proposition, 
" the state is only for the Capitalist. This war is 
got up by Capitalists. Whatever has to be done 
— we are rebels/^ 

Such a typical paper as the British Labour 
Leader, for example, may be read in vain, number 
after number, for any sound and sincere construc- 
tive proposal. It is a prolonged scream of extreme 
individualism, a monotonous repetition of incoher- 
ent discontent with authority, with direction, with 
union, with the European effort. It wants to do 
nothing. It just wants effort to stop — even at 
the price of German victory. If the whole fabric 



192 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 



of society in western Europe were to be handed 
over to those pseudo-socialists to-morrow, to be ad- 
ministered for the common good, they would fly 
the task in terror. They would make excuses and 
refuse the undertaking. They do not want the 
world to go right. The very idea of the world 
going right does not exist in their minds. They 
are embodied discontent and hatred, making trou- 
ble, and that is all they are. They want to be 
^' rebels " — to be admired as " rebels." 

That is the true psychology of the Resentful Em- 
ploye. He is a de-socialised man. His sense of 
the State has been destroyed. 

The Resentful Employes are the outcome of our 
social injustices. They are the failures of our so- 
cial and educational systems. We may regret their 
pitiful degradation, we may exonerate them from 
blame; none the less they are a pitiful crew. I 
have seen the hardship of the trenches, the gay and 
gallant wounded. I do a little understand what 
our soldiers, officers, and men alike have endured 
and done. And though I know I ought to allow for 
all that I have stated, I cannot regard these con- 
scientious objectors with anything but contempt. 
Into my house there pours a dismal literature re- 
hearsing the hardships of these men who set up to 
be martyrs for liberty ; So and So, brave hero, has 
been sworn at — positively sworn at by a corporal ; 



THE YIELDING PACIFIST 193 

a nasty rough man came into the cell of So and So 
and dropped several h's ; So and So, refusing to un- 
dress and wash, has been undressed and washed, 
and soap was rubbed into his eyes — perhaps pur- 
posely ; the food and accommodation are not of the 
best class; the doctors in attendance seem hasty; 
So and So was put into a damp bed and has got a 
nasty cold. Then I recall a jolly vanload of 
wounded men I saw out there. . . . 

But after all, we must be just. A Church and 
State that permitted these people to be thrust into 
dreary employment in their early teens, without 
hope or pride, deserves such citizens as these. The 
marvel is that there are so few. There is a poor 
thousand or so of these hopeless, resentment-poi- 
soned creatures in Great Britain. Against five 
willing millions. The Allied countries, I submit, 
have not got nearly all the conscientious objectors 
they deserve. 



If the Resentful Employe provides the emotional 
impulse of the resisting pacifist, whose horizon is 
bounded by his one passionate desire that the par- 
ticular social system that has treated him so ill 
should collapse and give in, and its leaders and 
rulers be humiliated and destroyed, the intellectual 



194 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

direction of a mischievous pacificism comes from an 
entirely different class. 

The Genteel Whig, though he differs very widely 
in almost every other respect from the Resentful 
Employe, has this much in common, that he has 
never been drawn into the whirl of the collective 
life in any real and assimilative fashion. This is 
what is the matter with both of them. He is a lit- 
tle loose shy independent person. Except for eat- 
ing and drinking — in moderation, he has never 
done anything real from the day he was born. He 
has frequently not even faced the common challenge 
of matrimony. Still more frequently is he child- 
less, or the daring parent of one peculiar child. He 
has never traded nor manufactured. He has drawn 
his dividends or his salary with an entire uncon- 
sciousness of any obligations to policemen or navy 
for these punctual payments. Probably he has 
never ventured even to re-invest his little legacy. 
He is acutely aware of possessing an exceptionally 
fine intelligence, but he is entirely unconscious of a 
fundamental unreality. Nothing has ever occurred 
to him to make him ask why the mass of men 
were either not possessed of his security or discon- 
tented with it. The impulses that took his school 
friends out upon all sorts of odd feats and adven- 
tures struck him as needless. As he grew up he 
turned with an equal distrust from passion or am- 



THE YIELDING PACIFIST 195 

bition. His friends went out after love, after ad- 
venture, after power, after knowledge, after this or 
that desire, and became men. But he noted merely 
that they became fleshly, that effort strained them, 
that they were sometimes angry or violent or 
heated. He could not but feel that theirs were 
vulgar experiences, and he sought some finer exer- 
cise for his exceptional quality. He pursued art or 
philosophy or literature upon their more esoteric 
levels and realised more and more the general vul- 
garity and coarseness of the world about him, and 
his own detachment. The vulgarity and crudity of 
the things nearest him impressed him most; the 
dreadful insincerity of the Press, the meretricious- 
ness of success, the loudness of the rich, the base- 
ness of the common people in his own land. The 
world overseas had by comparison a certain 
glamour. Except that when you said " United 
States " to him, he would draw in the air sharply 
between his teeth and beg you not to. . . . 

Nobody took him by the collar and shook him. 

If our world had considered the advice of Wil- 
liam James and insisted upon national service from 
every one, national service in the drains or the na- 
tionalised mines or the nationalised deep-sea fish- 
eries if not in the army or navy, we should not have 
had any such men. ^ If it had insisted that wealth 
and property are no more than a trust for the pub- 



196 ITALY, FEANCE AND BRITAIN 

lie benefit, we should have had no genteel indis- 
pensables. These discords in our national unanim- 
ity are the direct consequence of our bad social 
organisation. We permit the profiteer and the 
usurer; they evoke the response of the Reluctant 
Employe, and the inheritor of their wealth becomes 
the Genteel Whig. 

But that is by the way. It was of course natural 
and inevitable that the German onslaught upon Bel- 
gium and civilisation generally should strike these 
recluse minds not as a monstrous ugly wickedness 
to be resisted and overcome at any cost, but merely 
as a nerve-racking experience. Guns were going 
off on both sides. The Genteel Whig was chiefly 
conscious of a repulsive vast excitement all about 
him, in which many people did inelegant and irra- 
tional things. They waved flags — nasty little 
flags. This child of the ages, this last fruit of the 
gigantic and tragic tree of life, could no more than 
stick its fingers in its ears and say, " Oh, please, do 
all stop ! " and then as the strain grew intenser and 
intenser set itself with feeble pawings now to clam- 
ber " Au-dessus de la Melee," and now to — in some 
weak way — stop the conflict. ( " Au-dessus de la 
Melee '' — as the man said when they asked him 
where he was when the bull gored his sister. ) The 
efforts to stop the conflict at any price, even at the 
price of entire submission to the German Will, grew 



THE YIELDING PACIFIST 197 

more urgent as the necessity that every one should 
help against the German Thing grew more mani- 
fest. 

Of all the strange freaks of distressed thinking 
that this war has produced, the freaks of the Gen- 
teel Whig have been among the most remarkable. 
With an air of profound wisdom he returns per- 
petually to his proposition that there are faults on 
both sides. To say that is his conception of impar- 
tiality. I suppose that if a bull gored his sister he 
would say that there were faults on both sides ; his 
sister ought not to have strayed into the field, she 
was wearing a red hat of a highly provocative type ; 
she ought to have been a cow and then everything 
would have been different. In the face of the his- 
tory of the last forty years, the Genteel Whig strug- 
gles persistently to minimise the German outrage 
upon civilisation and to find excuses for Germany. 
He does this, not because he has any real passion 
for falsehood, but because by training, circum- 
stance, and disposition he is passionately averse 
from action with the vulgar majority and from self- 
sacrifice in a common cause, and because he finds in 
the justification of Germany and, failing that, in 
the blackening of the Allies to an equal blackness, 
one line of defence against the wave of impulse that 
threatens to submerge his private self. But when 
at last that line is forced he is driven back upon 



198 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

others equally extraordinary. You can often find 
simultaneously in the same Pacifist paper, and 
sometimes even in the utterances of the same writer, 
two entirely incompatible statements. The first is 
that Germany is so invincible that it is useless to 
prolong the war since no effort of the Allies is likely 
to produce any material improvement in their posi- 
tion, and the second is that Germany is so thor- 
oughly beaten that she is now ready to abandon 
militarism and make terms and compensations en- 
tirely acceptable to the countries she has forced 
into war. And when finally facts are produced to 
establish the truth that Germany, though still 
largely wicked and impenitent, is being slowly and 
conclusively beaten by the sanity, courage and per- 
sistence of the Allied common men, then the Gen- 
teel Whig retorts with his last defensive absurdity. 
He invents a national psychology for Germany. 
Germany, he invents, loves us and wants to be our 
dearest friend. Germany has always loved us. 
The Germans are a loving, unenvious people. They 
have been a little misled — but nice people do not 
insist upon that fact. But beware of beating Ger- 
many, beware of humiliating Germany ; then indeed 
trouble will come. Germany will begin to dislike 
us. She will plan a revenge. Turning aside from 
her erstwhile innocent career, she may even think 
of hate. What are our obligations to France, Italy, 



THE YIELDING PACIFIST 199 

Serbia, and Russia, what is the happiness of a few 
thousands of the Herero, a few millions of Bel- 
gians — whose numbers moreover are constantly di- 
minishing — when we weigh them against the dan- 
ger, the most terrible danger, of incurring perma- 
nent German hostility? . . . 

A Frenchman I talked to knew better than that. 
" What will happen to Germany," I asked, " if we 
are able to do so to her and so; would she take to 
dreams of a Revanche f 

" She will take to Anglomania," he said, and 
added after a flash of reflection, " In the long run 
it will be the worse for you." 



Ill 

THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL 

§ 1 

One of the indisputable things about the war so 
far as Britain and France goes — and I have rea- 
son to believe that on a lesser scale things are simi- 
lar in Italy — is that it has produced a very great 
volume of religious thought and feeling. About 
Russia in these matters we hear but little at the 
present time, but one guesses at parallelism. Peo- 
ple habitually religious have been stirred to new 
depths of reality and sincerity, and people are think- 
ing of religion who never thought of religion before. 
But as I have already pointed out, thinking and 
feeling about a matter is of no permanent value un- 
less something is thought out, unless there is a 
change of boundary or relationship, and it is an 
altogether different question to ask whether any 
definite change is resulting from this universal fer- 
ment. If it is not doing so, then the sleeper merely 
dreams a dream that he will forget again. . . . 

Now in no sort of general popular mental activity 
is there so much froth and waste as in religious ex- 

200 



THE KELIGIOUS KEVIVAL 201 

citements. This has been the case in all periods of 
religious revival. The people who are rather im- 
pressed, who for a few days or weeks take to read- 
ing their Bibles or going to a new place of worship 
or praying or fasting or being kind and unselfish, 
is always enormous in relation to the number whose 
lives are permanently changed. The effort needed 
if a contemporary is to blow off the froth, is always 
very considerable. 

Among the froth that I would blow off is I think 
most of the tremendous efforts being made in Eng- 
land by the Anglican church to attract favourable 
attention to itself apropos of the war. I came back 
from my visit to the Somme battlefields to find the 
sylvan peace of Essex invaded by a number of ladies 
in blue dresses adorned with large white crosses, 
who, regardless of the present shortage of nurses, 
were visiting every home in the place on some mis- 
sion of invitation whose details remained obscure. 
So far as I was able to elucidate this project, it was 
in the nature of a magic incantation ; a satisfactory 
end of the war was to be brought about by con- 
vergent prayer and religious assiduities. The mis- 
sion was shy of dealing with me personally, al- 
though as a lapsed communicant I should have 
thought myself a particularly hopeful field for 
Anglican effort, and it came to my wife and myself 
merely for our permission and countenance in an 



202 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

appeal to our domestic assistants. My wife con- 
sulted the household; it seemed very anxious to 
escape from that appeal, and as I respect Christi- 
anity sufficiently to detest the identification of its 
services with magic processes, the mission retired 
— civilly repulsed. But the incident aroused an 
uneasy curiosity in my mind with regard to the 
general trend of Anglican teaching and Anglican 
activities at the present time. The trend of my 
enquiries is to discover the church much more in- 
coherent and much less religious — in any decent 
sense of the word — than I had supposed it to be. 

Organisation is the life of material and the death 
of mental and spiritual processes. There could be 
no more melancholy exemplification of this than the 
spectacle of the Anglican and Catholic churches at 
the present time, one using the tragic stresses of the 
war mainly for pew-rent touting, and the other 
paralysed by its Austrian and South German po- 
litical connections from any clear utterance upon 
the moral issues of the w^ar. Through the opening 
phases of the war the Established Church of Eng- 
land was inconspicuous ; this is no longer the case, 
but it may be doubted whether the change is alto- 
gether to its advantage. To me this is a very great 
disappointment. I have always had a very high 
opinion of the intellectual value of the leading di- 
vines of both the Anglican and Catholic com- 



THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL 203 

munions. The self-styled Intelligenzia of Great 
Britain is all too prone to sneer at their equipment ; 
but I do not see how any impartial person can deny 
that Father Vaughan is in mental energy, vigour 
of expression, richness of thought and variety of 
information fully the equal of such an influential 
lay publicist as Mr. Horatio Bottomley. One 
might search for a long time among prominent lay- 
men to find the equal of the Bishop of London. 
Nevertheless it is impossible to conceal the impres- 
sion of tawdriness that this latter gentleman's work 
as head of the National Mission has left upon my 
mind. Attired in khaki he has recently been 
preaching in the open air to the people of London 
upon Tower Hill, Piccadilly, and other conspicuous 
places. Obsessed as I am by the humanities, and 
impressed as I have always been by the inferiority 
of material to moral facts, I would willingly have 
exchanged the sight of two burning Zeppelins for 
this spectacle of ecclesiastical fervour. But as it 
is, I am obliged to trust to newspaper reports and 
the descriptions of hearers and eye-witnesses. 
They leave but little doubt of the regrettable levity 
and superficiality of the bishop's utterances. 

We have a multitude of people chastened by 
losses, ennobled by a common effort, needing sup- 
port in that effort, perplexed by the reality of evil 
and cruelty, questioning and seeking after God. 



204 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

What does the National Mission offer? On Tower 
Hill the Bishop seems to have been chiefly busy 
with a wrangling demonstration that ten thousand 
a year is none too big a salary for a man subject to 
such demands and expenses as his see involves. So 
far from making anything out of his see he was, he 
declared, two thousand a year to the bad. Some 
day when the church has studied efficiency, I sup- 
pose that bishops will have the leisure to learn 
something about the general state of opinion and 
education in their dioceses. The Bishop of Lon- 
don was evidently unaware of the almost automatic 
response of the sharp socialists among his hearers. 
Their first enquiry would be to learn how he came 
by that mysterious extra two thousand a year with 
which he supplemented his stipend. How did he 

earn that? And if he didn't earn it ! And 

secondly they would probably have pointed out to 
him that his standard of housing, clothing, diet 
and entertaining was probably a little higher than 
theirs. It is really no proof of virtuous purity that 
a man's expenditure exceeds his income. And 
finally some other of his hearers were left unsatis- 
fied by his silence with regard to the current pro- 
posal to pool all clerical stipends for the common 
purposes of the church. It is a reasonable pro- 
posal, and if bishops must dispute about stipends 
instead of preaching the kingdom of God, then they 



THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL 205 

are bound to face it. The sooner they do so, the 
more graceful will the act be. From these personal 
apologetics the bishop took up the question of the j 
exemption, at the request of the bishops, of the 
clergy from military service. It is one of our con- 
trasts with French conditions — and it is all to the 
disadvantage of the British churches. 

In his Piccadilly contribution to the National 
Mission of Repentance and Hope the bishop did not 
talk politics but sex. He gave his hearers the sort 
of stufie that is handed out so freely by the Cinema 
Theatres, White Slave Traffic talk, denunciations 
of "Night Hawks" — whatever "Night Hawks" 
may be — and so on. On this or another occasion 
the bishop — he boasts that he himself is a healthy 
bachelor — lavished his eloquence upon the Fall in 
the Birth Rate, and the duty of all married people, 
from paupers upward, to have children persistently. 
Now sex like diet is a department of conduct and a 
very important department, but it isn't religion! 
The world is distressed by international disorder, 
by the monstrous tragedy of war; these little hot 
talks about indulgence and begetting have about as 
much to do with the vast issues that concern us as, 
let us say, a discussion of the wickedness of eating 
very new and indigestible bread. It is talking 
round and about the essential issue. It is fogging 
the essential issue, which is the forgotten and neg- 



206 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

lected kingship of God. The sin that is stirring the 
souls of men is the sin of this war. It is the sin of 
national egotism and the devotion of men to loyal- 
ties, ambitions, sects, churches, feuds, aggressions, 
and divisions that are an outrage upon God's uni- 
versal kingdom. 



§ 2 

The common clergy of France, sharing the mili- 
tary obligations and the food and privations of 
their fellow parishioners, contrast very vividly with 
the home-staying types of the ministries of the vari- 
ous British churches. I met and talked to several. 
Near Frise there were some barge gun-boats — they 
have since taken their place in the fighting but then 
they were a surprise — and the men had been very 
anxious to have their craft visited and seen. The 
priest who came after our party to see if he could 
still arrange that, had been decorated for gallantry. 
Of course the English too have their gallant chap- 
lains, but they are men of the officer caste, they are 
just young officers with peculiar collars; not men 
among men, as are the French priests. 

There can be no doubt that the behaviour of the 
French priests in this war has enormously dimin- 
ished anti-clerical bitterness in France. There can 
be no doubt that France is far more a religious 



THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL 207 

country than it was before the war. But if you ask 
whether that means any return to the church, any 
reinstatement of the church, the answer is a doubt- 
ful one. Religion and the simple priest are 
stronger in France to-day; the church, I think, is 
weaker. 

I trench on no theological discussion when I re- 
cord the unfavourable impression made upon all 
western Europe by the failure of the Holy Father 
to pronounce definitely upon the rights and wrongs 
of the war. The church has abrogated its right of 
moral judgment. Such at least seemed to be the 
opinion of the Frenchmen with whom I discussed 
a remarkable interview with Cardinal Gasparri 
that I found one morning in Le Journal. 

It was not the sort of interview to win the hearts 
of men who were ready to give their lives to set 
right what they believe to be the greatest outrage 
that has ever been inflicted upon Christendom, that 
is to say the forty-three years of military prepara- 
tion and of diplomacy by threats that culminated 
in the ultimatum to Serbia, the invasion of Belgium 
and the murder of the Vise villagers. It was 
adorned with a large portrait of " Benoit XV.," 
looking grave and discouraging over his spectacles, 
and the headlines insisted it was "La Pensee du 
Pape." Cross-heads sufficiently indicated the gen- 
eral tone. One read: 



208 ITALY, FEANCE AND BRITAIN 

" Le Saint Siege impartial. . . . 
Au-dessus de la hataille. . . ." 

The good Cardinal would have made a good law- 
yer. He had as little to say about God and the gen- 
eral righteousness of things as the Bishop of Lon- 
don. But he got in some smug reminders of the 
severance of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. 
Perhaps now France will be wiser. He pointed out 
that the Holy See in its Consistorial Allocution of 
January 22nd, 1915, invited the belligerents to ob- 
serve the laws of war. Could anything more be 
done than that? Oh ! — in the general issue of the 
war, if you want a judgment on the war as a whole, 
how is it possible for the Vatican to decide? 
Surely the French know that excellent principle of 
justice, Audiatur et altera pars, and how under ex- 
isting circumstances can the Vatican do that? . . . 
The Vatican is cut off from communication with 
Austria and Germany. The Vatican has been de- 
prived of its temporal power and local independence 
(another neat point). . . . 

So France is bowed out. When peace is restored 
the Vatican will perhaps be able to enquire if there 
was a big German army in 1914, if German diplo- 
macy was aggressive from 1875 onward, if Bel- 
gium was invaded unrighteously, if ( Catholic ) Aus- 
tria forced the pace upon (non-Catholic) Russia. 



THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL 209 

But now — now the Holy See must remain as im- 
partial as an unbought mascot in a shop win- 
dow. . . . 

The next column of Le Journal contained an ac- 
count of the Armenian massacres ; the blood of the 
Armenian cries out past the Holy Father to heaven ; 
but then Armenians are after all heretics, and here 
again the principle of Audiatur et altera pars 
comes in. Communications are not open with the 
Turks. Moreover, Armenians, like Serbs, are worse 
than infidels; they are heretics. Perhaps God is 
punishing them. . . . 

Audiatur et altera pars, and the Vatican has not 
forgotten the infidelity and disrespect of both 
France and Italy in the past. These are the things, 
it seems, that really matter to the Vatican. Cardi- 
nal Gasparri's portrait, in the same issue of Le 
Journal, displays a countenance of serene content- 
ment, a sort of incarnate " Told-you-so." 

So the Vatican lifts its pontifical skirts and 
shakes the dust of Western Europe off its feet. 

It is the most astounding renunciation in his- 
tory. 

Indubitably the Christian church took a wide 
stride from the kingship of God when it placed a 
golden throne for the unbaptised Constantine in the 
midst of its most sacred deliberations at Nicsea. 
But it seems to me that this abandonment of moral 



210 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

judgments in the present case by the Holy See is an 
almost wider step from the church's allegiance to 
God. ... 



Thought about the great questions of life, 
thought and reasoned direction, this is what the 
multitude demands mutely and weakly, and what 
the organised churches are failing to give. They 
have not the courage of their creeds. Either their 
creeds are intellectual flummery or they are the so- 
lution to the riddles with which the world is strug- 
gling. But the churches make no mention of their 
creeds. They chatter about sex and the magic effect 
of church attendance and simple faith. If simple 
faith is enough, the churches and their differences 
are an imposture. Men are stirred to the deepest 
questions about life and God, and the Anglican 
church, for example, obliges — as I have described. 

It is necessary to struggle against the unfavour- 
able impression made by these things. They must 
not blind us to the deeper movement that is in prog- 
ress in a quite considerable number of minds in 
England and France alike towards the realisation 
of the kingdom of God. 

What I conceive to be the reality of the religious 
revival is to be found in quarters remote from the 
religious professionals. Let me give but one in- 



THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL 211 

stance of several that occur to me. I met soon 
after my return from France a man who has stirred 
my curiosity for years, Mr. David Lubin, the prime 
mover in the organisation of the International In- 
stitute of Agriculture in Eome. It is a movement 
that has always appealed to my imagination. The 
idea is to establish and keep up to date a record of 
the production of food staples in the world with a 
view to the ultimate world control of food supply 
and distribution. When its machinery has devel- 
oped sufficiently it will of course be possible to ex- 
tend its activities to a control in the interests of 
civilisation of many other staples besides foodstuffs. 
It is in fact the suggestion and beginning of the 
economic world peace and the economic world 
state, just as the Hague Tribunal is the first faint 
sketch of a legal world state. The King of Italy 
has met Mr. Lubin's idea with open hands. ( It was 
because of this profoundly interesting experiment 
that in a not very widely known book of mine, The 
World Set Free (May, 1914), in which I repre- 
sented a world state as arising out of Armageddon, 
I made the first world conference meet at Brissago 
in Italian Switzerland under the presidency of the 
King of Italy.) So that when I found I could 
meet Mr. Lubin I did so very gladly. We lunched 
together in a pretty little room high over Knights- 
bridge, and talked through an afternoon. 



212 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

He is a man rather after the type of Gladstone 
he could be made to look like Gladstone in a cari 
cature, and he has that compelling quality of in 
tense intellectual excitement which was one of th 
great factors in the personal effectiveness of Glad 
stone. He is a Jew, but until I had talked to hiii 
for some time that fact did not occur to me. H 
is in very ill health, he has some weakness of th 
heart that grips and holds him at times white an* 
silent. 

At first we talked of his Institute and its wort! 
Then we came to shipping and transport. Wher 
ever one talks now of human affairs one comes pres 
ently to shipping and transport generally. Ij 
Paris, in Italy, when I returned to England, everj 
where I found " cost of carriage " was being du 
covered to be a question of fundamental impoi 
tance. Yet transport, railroads and shipping' 
these vitally important services in the world's ai 
fairs, are nearly everywhere in private hands an 
run for profit. In the case of shipping they are ru 
for profit on such antiquated lines that freight, 
vary from day to day and from hour to hour. I 
makes the business of food supply a gamble. An 
it need not be a gamble. 

But that is by the way in the present discussioi' 
As we talked, the prospect broadened out from 
prospect of the growing and distribution of food t 



THE KELIGIOUS REVIVAL 213 

general view of the world becoming one economic 
nmunity. 

[ talked of various people I had been meeting in 
I previous few weeks. " So many of us," I said, 
eem to be drifting away from the ideas of na- 
nalism and faction and policy, towards some- 
ng else which is larger. It is an idea of a right 
y of doing things for human purposes, independ- 
tly of these limited and localised references, 
ke such things as international hygiene, for ex- 
iple, take this movement. We are feeling our 
ly towards a bigger rule." 
" The rule of Eighteousness," said Mr. Lubin. 
I told him that I had been coming more and more 
the idea — not as a sentimentality or a metaphor, 
t as the ruling and directing idea, the structural 
3a, of all one's political and social activities — of 
e whole world as one state and community and of 
)d as the King of that state. 
" But / say that," cried Mr. Lubin, " I have put 
Y name to that. And — it is here!'' 
He struggled up, seized an Old Testament that 
y upon a side table, and flung it upon the table, 
e stood over it and rapped its cover. " It is 
re" he said, looking more like Gladstone than 
er, " in the Prophets." 



214 ITALY, FKANCE AND BKITAIN 

§ 4 

That is all I mean to tell at present of that con- 
versation. 

We talked of religion for two hours. Mr. Lubin 
sees things in terms of Israel and I do not. For 
all that we see things very much after the same 
fashion. That talk was only one of a number of 
talks about religion that I have had with hard and 
practical men who want to get the world straighter 
than it is, and who perceive that they must have a 
leadership and reference outside themselves. That 
is why I assert so confidently that there is a real 
deep religious movement afoot in the world. But 
not one of those conversations could have gone on, 
it would have ceased instantly, if any one bearing 
the uniform and brand of any organised religious 
body, any clergyman, priest, mollah, or suchlike 
advocate of the ten thousand patented religions in 
the world, had come in. He would have brought 
in his sectarian spites, his propaganda of church- 
going, his persecution of the heretic and the illegiti- 
mate, his ecclesiastical politics, his taboos and his 
doctrinal touchiness. . . . That is why, though I 
perceive there is a great wave of religious revival 
in the world to-day, I doubt whether it bodes well 
for the professional religious. . . . 

The other day I was talking to an eminent Angli- 



THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL 215 

can among various other people, and some one with 
an eye to him propounded this remarkable view. 

" There are four stages between belief and utter 
unbelief. There are those who believe in God, 
those who doubt him like Huxley the Agnostic, those 
who deny him like the Atheists but who do at least 
keep his place vacant, and lastly those who have 
set up a Church in his place. That is the last out- 
rage of unbelief." 



IV 

THE RIDDLE OF THE BRITISH 



All the French people I met in France seemed 
be thinking and talking about the English. 1 
English bring their own atmosphere with them ; 
begin with they are not so talkative, and I did i 
find among them anything like the same vigour 
examination, the same resolve to understand 1 
Anglo-French reaction, that I found among 1 
French. In intellectual processes L will conf 
that my sympathies are undisguisedly with 1 
French; the English will never think nor tj 
clearly until they get clerical " Greek " and shi 
" humanities " out of their public schools and s 
cere study and genuine humanities in; our dis 
genuous Anglican compromise is like a cold in 1 
English head, and the higher education in Ei 
land is a training in evasion. This is an alw£ 
lamentable state of affairs, but just now it is p 
ticularly lamentable because quite tremendous < 
portunities for the good of mankind turn on i 
possibility of a thorough and entirely frank muti 

216 



THE KIDDLE OF THE BEITISH 217 

nderstanding between Frencli, Italians, and Eng- 
sh. For years there has been a considerable 
mount of systematic study in France of English 
liought and English developments. Upon almost 
ny question of current English opinion and upon 
lost current English social questions, the best 
tudies are in French. But there has been little or 
reciprocal activity. The English in France 
eem to confine their French studies to La Vie 
^arisienne. It is what they have been led to expect 
f French literature. 

There can be no doubt in any reasonable mind 
liat this war is binding France and England very 
losely together. They dare not quarrel for the 
ext fifty years. They are bound to play a central 
art in the World League for the Preservation of 
*eace that must follow this struggle. There is no 
uestion of their practical union. It is a thing that 
lUst be. But it is remarkable that while the 
'rench mind is agog to apprehend every fact and 
etail it can about the British, to make the wisest 
nd fullest use of our binding necessities, that 
trange English " incuria " — to use the new slang 
-attains to its most monumental in this matter. 

So there is not much to say about how the British 
hink about the French. They do not think. They 
eel. At the outbreak of the war, when the per- 
ormance of France seemed doubtful, there was an 



218 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 



enormous feeling for France in Great Britain; it 
was like the formless feeling one has for a brother. 
It was as if Britain had discovered a new instinct. 
If France had crumpled up like paper, the English 
would have fought on passionately to restore her. 
That is ancient history now. Now the English 
still feel fraternal and fraternally proud; but in a 
mute way they are dazzled. Since the German at- 
tack on Verdun began, the French have achieved 
a crescendo. None of us could have imagined it. 
It did not seem possible to very many of us at the 
end of 1915 that either France or Germany could 
hold on for another year. There was much secret 
anxiety for France. It has given place now to un- 
stinted confidence and admiration. In their aston- 
ishment the British are apt to forget the impres- 
sive magnitude of their own effort, the millions of 
soldiers, the innumerable guns, the endless torrent 
of supplies that pour into France to avenge the 
little army of Mons. It seems natural to us that 
we should so exert ourselves under the circum- 
stances. I suppose it is wonderful, but, as a sam- 
ple Englishman, I do not feel that it is at all won- 
derful. I did not feel it wonderful even when I 
saw the British aeroplanes lording it in the air over 
Martinpuich, and not a German to be seen. Since 
Michael would have it so, there, at last, they were. 
There was a good deal of doubt in France about 



THE KIDDLE OP THE BRITISH 219 

the vigour of the British effort, until the Somme 
offensive. All that had been dispelled in August 
when I reached Paris. There was not the shadow 
of a doubt remaining anywhere of the power and 
loyalty of the British. These preliminary assur- 
ances have to be made, because it is in the nature of 
the French mind to criticise, and it must not be 
supposed that criticisms of detail and method af- 
fect the fraternity and complete mutual confidence 
which is the stuff of the Anglo-French relationship. 

§ 2 

Now first the French have been enormously as- 
tonished by the quality of the ordinary British sol- 
diers in our new armies. One Colonial colonel said 
something almost incredible to me — almost incred- 
ible as coming from a Frenchman ; it was a matter 
too solemn for any compliments or polite exagger- 
ations; he said in tones of wonder and conviction, 
" They are as good as ours." It was his acme of all 
possible praise. 

That means any sort of British soldier. Unless 
he is assisted by a kilt the ordinary Frenchman is 
unable to distinguish between one sort of British 
soldier and another. He cannot tell — let the 
ardent nationalist mark the fact ! — a Cockney from 
an Irishman or the Cardiff from the Essex note. 



220 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

He finds them all extravagantly and unquenchably 
cheerful and with a generosity — "like good chil- 
dren." There his praise is a little tinged by doubt. 
The British are reckless — recklessness in battle a 
Frenchman can understand, but they are also reck- 
less about to-morrow's bread and whether the tent 
is safe against a hurricane in the night. He is 
struck too by the fact that they are much more vocal 
than the French troops, and that they seem to have 
a passion for bad lugubrious songs. There he 
smiles and shrugs his shoulders, and indeed what 
else can any of us do in the presence of that mys- 
tery? At any rate the legend of the " phlegmatic " 
Englishman has been scattered to the four winds 
of heaven by the guns of the western front. The 
men are cool in action it is true; but for the rest 
they are, by the French standards, quicksilver. 

But I will not expand further upon the general 
impression made by the English in France. 
Philippe Millet's En Liaison avec les Anglais gives 
in a series of delightful pictures portraits of Brit- 
ish types from the French angle. There can be lit- 
tle doubt that the British quality, genial, naive, 
plucky and generous, has won for itself a real affec- 
tion in France wherever it has had a chance to dis- 
play itself. . . . 

But when it comes to British methods then the 
polite Frenchman's difficulties begin. Translating 



THE RIDDLE OF THE BRITISH 221 

hints into statements and guessing at reservations, 
I would say that the French fall very short of ad- 
miration of the way in which our higher ofl&cers set 
about their work, they are disagreeably impressed 
by a general want of sedulousness and close method 
in our leading. They think we economise brains 
and waste blood. They are shocked at the way in 
which obviously incompetent or inefficient men of 
the old army class are retained in their positions 
even after serious failures, and they were pro- 
foundly moved by the bad staff work and needlessly 
heavy losses of our opening attacks in July. They 
were ready to condone the blunderings and floun- 
derings of the 1915 offensive as the necessary pen- 
alties of an " amateur " army, they had had to learn 
their own lesson in Chamj^agne, but they were sur- 
prised to find how much the British had still to 
learn in July, 1916. The British officers excuse 
themselves because, they plead, they are still ama- 
teurs. " That is no reason," says the Frenchman, 
" why they should be amateurish." 

No Frenchman said as much as this to me, but 
their meaning was as plain as daylight. I tackled 
one of my guides in this matter; I said that it was 
the plain duty of the French military people to 
criticise British military methods sharply if they 
thought they were wrong. " It is not easy," he 
said. " Many British officers do not think they 



222 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

have anything to learn. And English people do 
not like being told things. What could we do? 
We could hardly send a French officer or so to your 
headquarters in a tutorial capacity. You have to 
do things in your own way." When I tried to draw 
General Castelnau into this dangerous question by 
suggesting that we might borrow a French general 
or so, he would say only, " There is only one way 
to learn war, and that is to make war." When it 
was too late, in the lift, I thought of the answer 
to that. There is only one way to make war, and 
that is by the sacrifice of incapables and the rapid 
promotion of able men. If old and tried types fail 
now, new types must be sought. But to do that 
we want a standard of efficiency. We want a con- 
ception of intellectual quality in performance that 
is still lacking. . . . 

M. Joseph Reinach, in whose company I visited 
the French part of the Somme front, was full of a 
scheme, which he has since published, for the break- 
ing up and recomposition of the French and British 
armies into a series of composite armies which 
would blend the magnificent British manhood and 
material with French science and military experi- 
ence. He pointed out the endless advantages of 
such an arrangement; the stimulus of emulation, 
the promotion of intimate fraternal feeling between 
the peoples of the two countries. "At present," 



THE RIDDLE OF THE BRITISH 223 

he said, " no Frenchman ever sees an Englishman 
except at Amiens or on the Somme. Many of them 
still have no idea of what the English are doing. . . ." 

" Have I ever told you the story of compulsory 
Greek at Oxford and Cambridge? " I asked ab- 
ruptly. 

" What has that to do with it? " 

" Or how two undistinguished civil service com- 
missioners can hold up the scientific education of 
our entire administrative class? " 

M. Eeinach protested further, 

" Because you are proposing to loosen the grip of 
a certain narrow and limited class upon British af- 
fairs, and you propose it as though it were a job 
as easy as rearranging railway fares or sending a 
van to Calais. That is the problem that every 
decent Englishman is trying to solve to-day, every 
man of that Greater Britain which has supplied 
these five million volunteers, these magnificent tem- 
porary oflflcers and all this wealth of munitions. 
And the oligarchy is so invincibly fortified! Do 
you think it will let in Frenchmen to share its con- 
trols? It will not even let in Englishmen. It 
holds the class schools; the class universities; the 
examinations for our public services are its class 
shibboleths; it is the church, the squirearchy, the 
permanent army class, permanent oflflcialdom; it 
makes every appointment, it is the fountain of 



224 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

honour; what it does not know is not knowledge, 
what it cannot do must not be done. It rules India, 
ignorautly and obstructively ; it will wreck the em- 
pire rather than relinquish its ascendency in Ire- 
land. It is densely self-satisfied and instinctively 
monopolistic. It is on our backs, and with it on 
our backs we common English must bleed and 
blunder to victory. . . . And you make this pro- 
posal ! " 



The antagonistic relations of the Anglican oli- 
garchy with the greater and greater-spirited Britain 
that thrusts behind it in this war are probably 
paralleled very closely in Germany, probably they 
are exaggerated in Germany with a bigger military 
oligarchy and a relatively lesser civil body at its 
back. This antagonism is the oddest outcome of 
the tremendous de-militarisation of war that has 
been going on. In France it is probably not so 
marked because of the greater flexibility and 
adaptability of the French culture. 

All military people — people, that is, profes- 
sionally and primarily military — are inclined to 
be conservative. For thousands of years the mili- 
tary tradition has been a tradition of discipline. 
The conception of the common soldier has been a 
mechanically obedient, almost de-humanised man, 



THE RIDDLE OF THE BRITISH 225 

of the officer a highly trained autocrat. In two 
years all this has been absolutely reversed. Indi- 
vidual quality, inventive organisation and indus- 
trialism will win this war. And no class is so inno- 
cent of these things as the military caste. Long 
accustomed as they are to the importance of moral 
effect they put a brave face upon the business ; they 
save their faces astonishingly, but they are no 
longer guiding and directing this war, they are 
being pushed from behind by forces they never fore- 
saw and cannot control. The aeroplanes and great 
guns have bolted with them, the tanks begotten of 
naval and civilian wits, shove them to victory in 
spite of themselves. 

Wherever I went behind the British lines the 
officers were going about in spurs. These spurs got 
at last upon my nerves. They became symbolical. 
They became as grave an insult to the tragedy of 
the war as if they were false noses. The British 
officers go for long automobile rides in spurs. 
They walk about the trenches in spurs. Occasion- 
ally I would see a horse ; I do not wish to be unfair 
in this matter, there were riding horses sometimes 
within two or three miles of the ultimate front, but 
they were rarely used. 

I do not say that the horse is entirely obsolete in 
this war. In war nothing is obsolete. In the 
trenches men fight with sticks. In the Pasubio 



226 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

battle the other day one of the Alpini silenced a 
machine gun by throwing stones. In the West Afri- 
can campaign we have employed troops armed with 
bows and arrows, and they have done very valuable 
work. But these are exceptional cases. The mili- 
tary use of the horse henceforth will be such an 
exceptional case. It is ridiculous for these spurs 
still to clink about the modern battlefield. What 
the gross cost of the spurs and horses and trappings 
of the British army amount to, and how many men 
are grooming and tending horses who might just 
as well be ploughing and milking at home I cannot 
guess ; it must be a total so enormous as seriously to 
affect the balance of the war. 

And these spurs and their retention are only the 
outward and visible symbol of the obstinate re- 
sistance of the Anglican intelligence to the clear 
logic of the present situation. It is not only the 
external equipment of our leaders that falls behind 
the times ; our political and administrative services 
are in the hands of the same desolatingly inadapt- 
able class. The British are still wearing spurs in 
Ireland; they are wearing them in India; and the 
age of the spur has passed. At the outset of this 
war there was an absolute cessation of criticism 
of the military and administrative castes ; it is be- 
coming a question whether we may not pay too 
heavily in blundering and waste, in military and 



THE RIDDLE OF THE BRITISH 227 

economic lassitude, in international irritation and 
the accumulation of future dangers in Ireland, 
Egypt, India, and elsewhere, for an apparent ab- 
sence of internal friction. These people have no 
gratitude for tacit help, no spirit of intelligent 
service, and no sense of fair play to the outsider. 
The latter deficiency indeed they call esprit de corps 
and prize it as if it were a noble quality. 

It becomes more and more imperative that the 
foreign observer should distinguish between this 
narrower, older official Britain and the greater 
newer Britain that struggles to free itself from the 
entanglement of a system outgrown. There are 
many Englishmen who would like to say to the 
French and the Irish and the Italians and India, 
who indeed feel every week now a more urgent need 
of saying, " Have patience with us." The Riddle 
of the British is very largely solved if you will 
think of a great modern liberal nation seeking to 
slough an exceedingly tough and tight skin. . . . 

Nothing is more illuminating and self-educa- 
tional than to explain one's home politics to an in- 
telligent foreigner enquirer; it strips off all the 
secondary considerations, the allusiveness, the 
merely tactical considerations. One sees the forest 
not as a confusion of trees but as something with a 
definite shape and place. I was asked in Italy and 
in France, " Where does Lord Northcliffe come into 



228 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

the British system — or Lloyd George? Who is 
Mr. Redmond? Why is Lloyd George a Minister, 
and why does not Mr. Redmond take office? Isn't 
there something called an ordnance department, 
and why is there a separate ministry of munitions? 
Can Mr. Lloyd George remove an incapable gen- 
eral? . . ." 

I found M. Joseph Reinach particularly pene- 
trating and persistent. It is an amusing but rather 
difficult exercise to recall what I tried to convey 
to him by way of a theory of Britain. He is by no 
means an uncritical listener. I explained that 
there is an " inner Britain," official Britain, which 
is Anglican or official Presbyterian, which at the 
outside in the whole world cannot claim to speak 
for twenty million Anglican and Presbyterian com- 
municants, which monopolises official positions, ad- 
ministration and honours in the entire British em- 
pire, dominates the court, and, typically, is spurred 
and red-tabbed. ( It was just at this time that the 
spurs were most on my nerves.) 

This inner Britain, I went on to explain, holds 
tenaciously to its positions of advantage, from 
which it is difficult to dislodge it without upsetting 
the whole empire, and it insists upon treating the 
rest of the four hundred millions who constitute 
that emj)ire as outsiders, foreigners, subject races 
and suspected persons. 



THE RIDDLE OF THE BRITISH 229 

" To you," I said, " it bears itself with an appear- 
ance of faintly hostile, faintly contemptuous apa- 
thy. It is still so entirely insular that it shudders 
at the thought of the Channel Tunnel. This is the 
Britain which irritates and puzzles you so intensely 
— that you are quite unable to conceal these feel- 
ings from me. Unhappily it is the Britain you see 
most of. Well, outside this official Britain is 
* Greater Britain ' — the real Britain with which 
you have to reckon in future." (From this point 
a faint flavour of mysticism crept into my disserta- 
tion. I found myself talking with something in my 
voice curiously reminiscent of those liberal Rus- 
sians w^ho set themselves to explain the contrasts 
and contradictions of " official " Russia and " true " 
Russia.) "This Greater Britain," I asserted, "is 
in a perpetual conflict with official Britain, strug- 
gling to keep it up to its work, shoving it towards 
its ends, endeavouring in spite of the tenacious mis- 
chievousness of the privileged, to keep the peace 
and a common aim with the French and Irish and 
Italians and Russians and Indians. It is to that 
outer Britain that those Englishmen you found so 
interesting and sympathetic, Lloyd George and 
Lord Northcliffe, for example, belong. It is the 
Britain of the great effort, the Britain of the smok- 
ing factories and the torrent of munitions, the Brit- 
ain of the men and subalterns of the new armies, 



230 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

the Britain which invents and thinks and achieves 
and stands now between German imperialism and 
the empire of the world. I do not want to exag- 
gerate the quality of greater Britain. If the inner 
set are narrowly educated, the outer set is often 
crudely educated. If the inner set is so close knit 
as to seem like a conspiracy, the outer set is so 
loosely knit as to seem like a noisy confusion. 
Greater Britain is only beginning to realise itself 
and find itself. For all its crudity there is a giant 
spirit in it feeling its way towards the light. It 
has quite other ambitions for the ending of the war 
than some haggled treaty of alliance with France 
and Italy; some advantage that will invalidate 
German competition ; it begins to realise newer and 
wider sympathies, possibilities of an amalgamation 
of interests and a community of aim that it is ut- 
terly beyond the habits of the old oligarchy to con- 
ceive, beyond the scope of that tawdry word ' Em- 
pire ' to express. . . ." 

I descended from my rhetoric to find M. Reinach 
asking how and when this greater Britain was 
likely to become politically effective. 



V 

THE SOCIAL CHANGES IN PROGRESS 

§ 1 

" Nothing will be the same after the war." This 
is one of the consoling platitudes with which people 
cover over voids of thought. They utter it with an 
air of round-eyed profundity. But to ask in reply, 
"Then how will things be different?" is in many 
cases to rouse great resentment. It is almost as 
rude as saying, " Was that thought of yours really 
a thought?" 

Let us in this chapter confine ourselves to the 
social-economic processes that are going on. So far 
as I am able to distinguish among the things that 
are being said in these matters, they may be classi- 
fied out into groups that centre upon several typi- 
cal questions. There is the question of " How to 
pay for the war? " There is the question of the be- 
haviour of labour after the war. " Will there be 
a Labour Truce or a violent labour struggle? " 
There is the question of the reconstruction of Euro- 
pean industry after the war in the face of an Amer- 
ica in a state of monetary and economic repletion 

231 



232 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

through non-intervention. My present purpose in 
this chapter is a critical one ; it is not to solve prob- 
lems but to set out various currents of thought that 
are flowing through the general mind. Which cur- 
rent is likely to seize upon and carry human affairs 
with it, is not for our present speculation. 

There seem to be two distinct ways of answering 
the first of the questions I have noted. They do not 
necessarily contradict each other. Of course the 
war is being largely paid for immediately out of 
the accumulated private wealth of the past. We 
are buying off the " hold-up " of the private owner 
upon the material and resources we need, and pay- 
ing in paper money and war loans. This is not in 
itself an impoverishment of the community. The 
wealth of individuals is not the wealth of nations ; 
the two things may easily be contradictory when 
the rich man's wealth consists of land or natural 
resources or franchises or privileges, the use of 
which he reluctantly yields for high prices. The 
conversion of held-up land and material into work- 
able and actively used material in exchange for 
national debt may be indeed a positive increase in 
the wealth of the community. And what is hap- 
pening in all the belligerent countries is the taking 
over of more and more of the realities of wealth 
from private hands and, in exchange, the contract- 
ing of great masses of debt to private people. The 



SOCIAL CHANGES IN PROGRESS 233 

net tendency is towards the disappearance of a 
reality holding class and the destruction of realities 
in warfare, and the appearance of a vast rentier 
class in its place. At the end of the war much ma- 
terial will be destroyed for evermore, transit, food 
production and industry will be everywhere enor- 
mously socialised, and the country will be liable to 
pay every year in interest, a sum of money exceed- 
ing the entire national expenditure before the war. 
From the point of view of the state, and disregard- 
ing material and moral damages, that annual inter- 
est is the annual instalment of the price to be paid 
for the war. 

Now the interesting question arises whether these 
great belligerent states may go bankrupt, and if so 
to what extent. States may go bankrupt to the 
private creditor without repudiating their debts or 
seeming to pay less to him. They can go bankrupt 
either by a depreciation of their currency or — 
without touching the gold standard — through a 
rise in prices. In the end both these things work 
out to the same end; the creditor gets so many 
loaves or pairs of boots or workman's hours of 
labour for his pound less than he would have got 
under the previous conditions. One may imagine 
this process of price (and of course wages) increase 
going on to a limitless extent. Many people are 
inclined to look to such an increase in prices as a 



234 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

certain outcome of the war, and just so far as it 
goes, just so far will the burthen of the rentier class, 
their call that is for goods and services, be light- 
ened. This expectation is very generally enter- 
tained, and I can see little reason against it. The 
intensely stupid or dishonest " labour " press, how- 
ever, w^hich in the interests of the common enemy 
misrepresents socialism and seeks to misguide la- 
bour in Great Britain, ignores these considerations, 
and positively holds out this prospect of rising 
prices as an alarming one to the more credulous and 
ignorant of its readers. 

But now comes the second way of meeting the 
after-the-war obligations. This second way is by 
increasing the wealth of the state and by increas- 
ing the national production to such an extent that 
the payment of the rentier class wil^ not be an over- 
whelming burthen. Rising prices bilk the creditor. 
Increased production will check the rise in prices 
and get him a real payment. The outlook for the 
national creditor seems to be that he will be partlj^ 
bilked and partly paid; how far he will be bilked 
and how far paid depends almost entirely upon this 
possible increase in production ; and there is conse- 
quently a very keen and quite unprecedented desire 
very widely diffused among intelligent and active 
people, holding War Loan scrip and the like, in all 
the belligerent countries, to see bold and hopeful 



SOCIAL CHANGES IN PKOGRESS 235 

schemes for state enrichment pushed forward. The 
movement towards socialism is receiving an impulse 
from a new and unexpected quarter, there is now a 
rentier socialism, and it is interesting to note that 
while the London Times is full of schemes of great 
state enterprises, for the exploitation of Colonial 
state lands, for the state purchase and wholesaling 
of food and many natural products, and for the 
syndication of shipping and the great staple indus- 
tries into vast trusts into which not only the British 
but the French and Italian governments may enter 
as partners, the so-called socialist press of Great 
Britain is chiefly busy about the draughts in the 
cell of Mr. Fenner Brockway and the refusal of 
Private Scott Duckers to put on his khaki trousers. 
The New Statesman and the Fabian Society, how- 
ever, display a wider intelligence. 

There is a great variety of suggestions for this 
increase of public wealth and production. Many 
of them have an extreme reasonableness. The ex- 
tent to which they will be adopted depends, no 
doubt, very largely upon the politician and perma- 
nent official, and both those classes are prone to 
panic in the presence of reality. In spite of its 
own interest in restraining a rise in prices, the old 
official " salariat " is likely to be obstructive to any 
such innovations. It is the resistance of spurs and 
red tabs to military innovations over again. This 



236 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

is the resistance of quills and red tape. On the 
other hand, the organisation of Britain for war has 
" officialised " a number of industrial leaders, and 
created a large body of temporary and adventurous 
officials. They may want to carry on into peace 
production the great new factories the war has cre- 
ated. At the end of the war, for example, every 
belligerent country will be in urgent need of cheap 
automobiles for farmers, tradesmen, and industrial 
purposes generally. America is now producing 
such automobiles at a price of eighty pounds. But 
Europe will be heavily in debt to America, her in- 
dustries will be disorganised, and there will there- 
fore be no sort of return payment possible for these 
hundreds of thousands of automobiles. A country 
that is neither creditor nor producer cannot be an 
importer. Consequently though those cheap tin 
cars may be stacked as high as the Washington 
Monument in America, they will never come to 
Europe. On the other hand, the great shell fac- 
tories of Europe will be standing idle and ready, 
their staffs disciplined and available, for conver- 
sion to the new task. The imperative common- 
sense of the position seems to be that the European 
governments should set themselves straight away to 
out-Ford Ford, and provide their own people with 
cheap road transport. 

But here comes in the question whether this com- 



SOCIAL CHANGES IN PROGRESS 237 

monsense course is inevitable. Suppose the men- 
tal energy left in Europe after the war is insufficient 
for such a constructive feat as this. There will 
certainly be the obstruction of official pedantry, the 
hold-up of this vested interest and that, the greedy 
desire of " private enterprise " to exploit the occa- 
sion upon rather more costly and less productive 
lines, the general distrust felt by ignorant and un- 
imaginative people of a new way of doing things. 
The process after all may not get done in the ob- 
viously wise way. This will not mean that Europe 
will buy American cars. It will be quite unable to 
buy American cars. It will be unable to make any- 
thing that America will not be able to make more 
cheaply for itself. But it will mean that Europe 
will go on without cheap cars, that is to say it will 
go on more sluggishly and clumsily and wastefully 
at a lower economic level. Hampered transport 
means hampered production of other things, and 
an increasing inability to buy abroad. And so we 
go down and down. 

It does not follow that because a course is the 
manifestly right and advantageous course for the 
community that it will be taken. I am reminded 
of this by a special basket in my study here, into 
which I pitch letters, circulars, pamphlets and so 
forth as they come to hand from a gentleman named 
Gatti, and his friends Mr. Adrian Ross, Mr. Roy 



238 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

Horniman, Mr. Henry Murray, and others. His 
particular project is the construction of a Railway 
Clearing House for London. It is an absolutely 
admirable scheme. It would cut down the heavy 
traffic in the streets of London to about one-third ; 
it would enable us to run the goods traffic of Eng- 
land with less than half the number of railway 
trucks we now employ ; it would turn over enormous 
areas of valuable land from their present use as rail- 
ways goods yards and sidings; it would save time 
in the transit of goods and labour in their handling. 
It is a quite beautifully worked out scheme. For 
the last eight or ten years this group of devoted 
fanatics has been pressing this undertaking upon 
an indifferent country w^ith increasing vehemence 
and astonishment at that indifference. The point 
is that its adoption, though it would be of enor- 
mous general benefit, would be of no particular 
benefit to any leading man or highly placed official. 
On the other hand, it would upset all sorts of indi- 
viduals who are in a position to obstruct it quietly 
— and they do so. Meaning no evil. I dip my 
hand in the accumulation and extract a leaflet by 
the all too zealous Mr. Murray. In it he denounces 
various public officials by name as cheats and 
scoundrels, and invites a prosecution for libel. 

In that fashion nothing will ever get done. 
There is no prosecution, but for all that I do not 



SOCIAL CHANGES IN PROGRESS 239 

agree with Mr. Murray about the men he names. 
These gentlemen are just comfortable gentlemen, 
own brothers to these old generals of ours who will 
not take off their spurs. They are probably quite 
charming people except that they know nothing of 
that Fear of God which searches the heart. Why 
should they bother? 

So many of these after-the-war problems bring 
one back to the question how far the war has put 
the Fear of God into the hearts of responsible men. 
There is really no other reason in existence that I 
can imagine why they should ask themselves the 
question, "Have I done my best?" and that still 
more important question, " Am I doing my best 
now? " And so while I hear plenty of talk about 
the great reorganisations that are to come after 
the war, while there is the stir of doubt among the 
rentiers whether, after all, they will get paid, while 
the unavoidable stresses and sacrifices of the war 
are making many people question the rightfulness 
of much that they did as a matter of course, and 
of much that they took for granted, I perceive there 
is also something dull and not very articulate in 
this European world, something resistant and inert, 
that is like the obstinate rolling over of a heavy 
sleeper after he has been called upon to get up. 
" Just a little longer. . . . Just for my time." 

One thouorht alone seems to make these more in- 



240 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

tractable peoj)le anxious. I thrust it in as my last 
stimulant when everything else has failed. " There 
will be frightful trouble with labour after the war," 
I say. 

They try to persuade themselves that military 
discipline is breaking in labour. . . . 



What does British labour think of the outlook 
after the war? 

As a distinctive thing British labour does not 
think. " Class-conscious labour," as the Marxists 
put it, scarcely exists in Britain. The only con- 
vincing case I ever met was a bath-chairman of 
literary habits at Eastbourne. The only people 
who are, as a class, class-conscious in the British 
community are the Anglican gentry and their fringe 
of the genteel. Everybody else is "respectable." 
The mass of British workers find their thinking in 
the ordinary halfpenny papers or in John Bull. 
The so-called labour papers are perhaps less repre- 
sentative of British labour than any other section 
of the press; the Labour Leader, for example, is 
the organ of such people as Bertrand Russell, Ver- 
non Lee, Morel, academic rentiers who know about 
as much of the labour side of industrialism as they 
do of cock-fighting. All the British peoples are 



SOCIAL CHANGES IN PEOGEESS 241 

racially willing and good-tempered people, quite 
ready to be led by those they imagine to be abler 
than themselves. They make the most cheerful and 
generous soldiers in the whole world, without in- 
sisting upon that democratic respect which the 
Frenchman exacts. They do not criticise and they 
do not trouble themselves much about the general 
plan of operations, so long as they have confidence 
in the quality and good-will of their leading. But 
British soldiers will hiss a general when they think 
he is selfish, unfeeling, or a muff. And the social- 
ist propaganda has imported ideas of public service 
into private employment. Labour in Britain has 
been growing increasingly impatient of bad or self- 
ish industrial leadership. Labour trouble in Great 
Britain turns wholly upon the idea crystallised in 
the one word " profiteer." Legislation and regu- 
lation of hours of labour, high wages, nothing will 
keep labour quiet in Great Britain if labour thinks 
it is being exploited for private gain. 

Labour feels very suspicious of private gain. 
For that suspicion a certain rather common type 
of employer is mainly to blame. Labour believes 
that employers as a class cheat workmen as a class, 
plan to cheat them, of their full share in the com- 
mon output, and drive hard bargains. It believes 
that private employers are equally ready to sacri- 
fice the welfare of the nation and the welfare of the 



242 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

workers for mere personal advantage. It has a 
traditional experience to support these suspicions. 

In no department of morals have ideas changed 
so completely during the last eighty years as in 
relation to " profits." Eighty years ago every one 
believed in the divine right of property to do what 
it pleased with its advantages, a doctrine more dis- 
astrous socially than the divine right of kings. 
There was no such sense of the immorality of " hold- 
ing up " as pervades the public conscience to-day. 
The worker was expected not only to work, but to 
be grateful for employment. The property owner 
held his property and handed it out for use and 
development or not, just as he thought fit. These 
ideas are not altogether extinct to-day. Only a few 
days ago I met a magnificent old lady of seventy- 
nine or eighty, who discoursed upon the wicked- 
ness of her gardener in demanding another shilling 
a week because of war prices. 

She was a valiant and handsome personage. A 
face that had still a healthy natural pinkness looked 
out from under blond curls, and an elegant and 
carefully tended hand tossed back some fine old 
lace to gesticulate more freely. She had previously 
charmed her hearers by sweeping aside certain in- 
vasion rumours that were drifting about. 

"Germans invade C7s/" she cried. "Who'd let 
'em, I'd like to know? Who'd let 'em? " 



SOCIAL CHANGES IN PROGRESS 243 

And then she reverted to her grievance about the 
gardener. 

" I told him that after the war he'd be glad 
enough to get anything. Grateful ! They'll all be 
coming back after the war — all of 'em, glad enough 
to get anything. Asking for another shilling in- 
deed!" 

Every one who heard her looked shocked. But 
that was the tone of every one of importance in the 
dark years that followed the Napoleonic wars. 
That is just one survivor of the old tradition. An- 
other is Blight the solicitor, who goes about bewail- 
ing the fact that we writers are " holding out false 
hopes of higher agricultural wages after the war." 
But these are both exceptions. They are held to 
be remarkable people even by their own class. The 
mass of property owners and influential people in 
Europe to-day no more believe in the sacred right 
of property to hold up development and dictate 
terms than do the more intelligent workers. The 
ideas of collective ends and of the fiduciary nature 
of property had been soaking through the Euro- 
pean community for years before the war. The 
necessity for sudden and even violent co-operations 
and submersions of individuality in a common pur- 
pose, which this war has produced, is rapidly 
crystallising out these ideas into clear proposals. 

War is an evil thing, but people who will not 



244 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

learn from reason must have an ugly teacher. This 
war has brought home to every one the supremacy 
of the public need over every sort of individual 
claim. 

One of the most remarkable things in the British 
war press is the amount of space given to the dis- 
cussion of labour developments after the war. 
This is in its completeness peculiar to the British 
situation. Nothing on the same scale is percepti- 
ble in the press of the Latin allies. A great move- 
ment on the part of capitalists and business organ- 
isers is manifest to assure the worker of a change 
of heart and a will to change method. Labour is 
suspicious, not foolishly but wisely suspicious. 
But Labour is considering it. 

" National industrial syndication," say the busi- 
ness organisers. 

" Guild socialism," say the workers. 

There is also a considerable amount of talking 
and writing about " profit-sharing " and about giv- 
ing the workers a share in the business direction. 
Neither of these ideas appeals to the shrewder heads 
among the workers. So far as direction goes their 
disposition is to ask the captain to command the 
ship. So far as profits go, they think the captain 
has no more right than the cabin boy to specula- 
tive gains; he should do Ms work for his pay 



SOCIAL CHANGES IN PROGRESS 245 

whether it is profitable or unprofitable work. 
There is little balm for labour discontent in these 
schemes for making the worker also an infinitesimal 
profiteer. 

During my journey in Italy and France I met 
several men who were keenly interested in business 
organisation. Just before I started my friend N., 
who has been the chief partner in the building up 
of a very big and very extensively advertised Ameri- 
can business, came to see me on his way back to 
America. He is as interested in his work as a 
scientific specialist, and as ready to talk about it 
to any intelligent and interested hearer. He was 
particularly keen upon the question of continuity 
in the business, when it behoves the older genera- 
tion to let in the younger to responsible manage- 
ment and to efface themselves. He was a man of 
five-and forty. Incidentally he mentioned that he 
had never taken anything for his private life out 
of the great business he had built up but a salary, 
"a good salary," and that now he was going to 
grant himself a pension. " I shan't interfere any 
more. I shall come right away and live in Europe 
for a year so as not to be tempted to interfere. The 
boys have got to run it some day, and they had 
better get their experience while they're young and 
capable of learning it. I did." 



246 ITALY, FKANCE AND BEITAIN 

I like N.'s ideas. " Practically," I said, " you've 
been a public official. You've treated your business 
like a public service." 

That was his idea. 

"Would you mind if it was a public service?" 

He reflected, and some disagreeable memory 
darkened his face. ■ " Under the politicians? " he 
said. 

I took the train of thought N. had set going 
abroad with me next day. I had the good luck 
to meet men who were interesting industrially. 
Captain Pirelli, my guide in Italy, has a name 
familiar to every motorist; his name goes wher- 
ever cars go, spelt with a big long capital P. Lieu- 
tenant de Tessin's name will recall one of the most 
interesting experiments in profit-sharing to the 
student of social science. I tried over N.'s problem 
on both of them. I found in both their minds just 
the same attitude as he takes up towards his busi- 
ness. They think any businesses that are worthy 
of respect, the sorts of businesses that interest them, 
are public functions. Money-lenders and specu- 
lators, merchants and gambling gentlefolk may 
think in terms of profit ; capable business directors 
certainly do nothing of the sort. 

I met a British officer in France who is also a 
landowner. I got him to talk about his adminis- 
trative work upon his property. He was very keen 



SOCIAL CHANGES IN PROGRESS 247 

upon new methods. He said he tried to do his 
duty by his land. 

" How much land? " I asked. 

" Just over nine thousand acres," he said. 

" But you could manage forty or fifty thousand 
with little more trouble." 

" If I had it. In some ways it would be easier." 

" What a waste ! " I said. " Of course you ought 
not to own these acres; what you ought to be is 
the agricultural controller of just as big an estate 
of the public lands as you could manage — with a 
suitable salary." 

He reflected upon that idea. He said he did 
not get much of a salary out of his land as it was, 
and made a regrettable allusion to Mr. Lloyd 
George. " When a man tries to do his duty by 
the land," he said. . . . 

But here running through the thoughts of the 
Englishman and the Italian and the Frenchman 
and the American alike one finds just the same 
idea of a kind of officialism in ownership. It is 
an idea that pervades our thought and public dis- 
cussion to-day everywhere, and it is an idea that 
is scarcely traceable at all in the thought of the 
early half of the nineteenth century. The idea of 
service and responsibility in property has increased 
and is increasing, the conception of " hold-up," the 
usurer's conception of his right to be bought out 



248 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

of the way, fades. And the process has been enor- 
mously enhanced by the various big-scale experi- 
ments in temporal^ socialism that have been forced 
upon the belligerent powers. Men of the most in- 
dividualistic quality are being educated up to the 
possibilities of concerted collective action. My 
friend and fellow-student Y., inventor and business 
organiser, who used to make the best steam omni- 
buses in the world, and who is now making all 
sorts of things for the army, would go pink with 
suspicious anger at the mere words " inspector '^ 
or " socialism " three or four years ago. He does 
not do so now. 

A great proportion of this sort of man, this en- 
ergetic directive sort of man in England, is think- 
ing socialism to-day. They may not be saying 
socialism, but they are thinking it. When labour 
begins to realise what is adrift it will be divided 
between two things : between appreciative co-opera- 
tion, for which guild socialism in particular has 
prepared its mind, and traditional suspicion. I 
will not offer to guess here which will prevail. 



The impression I have of the present mental 
process in the European communities is that while 
the official class and the rentier class is thinking 



SOCIAL CHANGES IN PROGRESS 249 

very poorly and inadequately and with a merely 
obstructive disposition; while the churches are 
merely wasting their energies in futile self-adver- 
tisement; while the labour mass is suspicious and 
disposed to make terms for itself rather than come 
into any large schemes of reconstruction that will 
abolish profit as a primary aim in economic life, 
there is still a very considerable movement towards 
such a reconstruction. Nothing is so misleading 
as a careless analogy. In the dead years that fol- 
lowed the Napoleonic wars, which are often quoted 
as a precedent for expectation now, the spirit of 
collective service was near its minimum; it was 
never so strong and never so manifestly spreading 
and increasing as it is to-day. 

But service to what? 

I have my own very strong preconceptions here, 
and since my temperament is sanguine they neces- 
sarily colour my view. I believe that this impulse 
to collective service can satisfy itself only under 
the formula that mankind is one state of which 
God is the undying king, and that the service of 
men's collective needs is the true worship of God. 
But eagerly as I would grasp at any evidence that 
this idea is being developed and taken up by the 
general consciousness, I am quite unable to per- 
suade myself that anything of the sort is going on. 
I do perceive a search for large forms into which 



250 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

the prevalent impulse to devotion can be thrown. 
But the organised religious bodies, with their creeds 
and badges and their instinct for self-preservation 
at any cost, stand between men and their spiritual 
growth in just the same way the forest allers stand 
between men anc^ food. Their activities at present 
are an almost intolerable nuisance. One cannot 
say " God " but some tout is instantly seeking to 
pluck one into his particular cave of flummery and 
orthodoxy. What a rational man means by God is 
just God. The more you define and argue about 
God the more he remains the same simple thing. 
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, modern Hindu relig- 
ious thought, all agree in declaring that there is one 
God, master and leader of all mankind, in unending 
conflict with cruelty, disorder, folly and waste. To 
my mind, it follows immediately that there can be 
no king, no government of any sort, which is not 
either a subordinate or a rebel government, a local 
usurpation, in the kingdom of God. But no or- 
ganised religious body has ever had the courage 
and honesty to insist upon this. They all pander 
to nationalism and to powers and princes. They 
exist so to pander. Every organised religion in 
the world exists only to exploit and divert and 
waste the religious impulse in man. 

This conviction that the world kingdom of God 
is the only true method of human service, is so 



SOCIAL CHANGES IN PROGEESS 251 

clear and final in my own mind, it seems so inevi- 
tably the conviction to which all right-thinking men 
must ultimately come, that I feel almost like a 
looker-on at a game of blindman's buff as I watch 
the discussion of synthetic political ideas. The 
blind man thrusts his seeking hands into the oddest 
corners, he clutches at chairs and curtains, but at 
last he must surely find and hold and feel over 
and guess the name of the plainly visible quarry. 
Some of the French and Italian people I talked 
to said they were fighting for " Civilisation." That 
is one name for the kingdom of God, and I have 
heard English people use it too. But much of the 
contemporary thought of England still wanders 
with its back to the light. Most of it is pawing 
over jerry-built, secondary things. I have before 
me a little book, the joint work of Dr. Grey and 
Mr. Turner, of an ex-public schoolmaster and a 
manufacturer, called Eclipse or Empire? (The 
title World Might or Downfall? had already been 
secured in another quarter. ) It is a book that has 
been enormously advertised ; it has been almost im- 
possible to escape its column-long advertisements; 
it is billed upon the hoardings, and it is on the 
whole a very able and right-spirited book. It calls 
for more and better education, for more scientific 
methods, foi* less class suspicion and more social 
explicitness and understanding, for a franker and 



252 ITALY, FEANCE AND BRITAIN 

fairer treatment of labour. But why does it call 
for these things? Does it call for them because 
they are right? Because in accomplishing them 
one serves God? 

Not at all. But because otherwise this strange 
sprawling empire of ours will drop back into a 
secondary place in the world. These two waiters 
really seem to think that the slack workman, the 
slacker wealthy man, the negligent official, the con- 
servative schoolmaster, the greedy usurer, the com- 
fortable obstructive, confronted with this alterna- 
tive, terrified at this idea of something or other 
called the Empire being "eclipsed," eager for the 
continuance of this undefined glory over their fel- 
low-creatures called " Empire," will perceive the 
error of their ways and become energetic, devoted, 
capable. They think an ideal of that sort is going 
to change the daily lives of men. ... I sympathise 
with their purpose, and I deplore their conception 
of motives. If men will not give themselves for 
righteousness, they will not give themselves for a 
geographical score. If they will not work well for 
the hatred of bad work, they will not work well for 
the hatred of Germans. This " Empire " idea has 
been cadging about the British empire, trying to 
collect enthusiasm and devotion, since the days of 
Disraeli. It is, I submit, too big for the mean- 
spirited, and too tawdry and limited for the fine 



SOCIAL CHANGES IN PROGRESS 253 

and generous. It leaves out the Frencli and the 
Italians and the Belgians and all our blood brother- 
hood of allies. It has no compelling force in it. 
We British are not naturally Imperialist; we are 
something greater — or something less. For two 
years and a half now we have been fighting against 
Imperialism in its most extravagant form. It is 
a poor incentive to right living to propose to par- 
ody the devil we fight against. 

The blind man must lunge again. 

For when the right answer is seized it answers 
not only the question why men should work for 
their fellow-men but also why nation should cease 
to arm and plan and contrive against nation. The 
social problem is only the international problem 
in retail, the international problem is only the 
social one in gross. 

My bias rules me altogether here. I see men in 
social, in economic and in international affairs, 
alike eager to put an end to conflict, Inexpressibly 
weary of conflict and the waste and pain and death 
it involves. But to end conflict one must abandon 
aggressive or uncordial pretensions. Labour is 
sick at the idea of more strikes and struggles after 
the war, industrialism is sick of competition and 
anxious for service, everybody is sick of war. But 
how can they end any of these clashes except by 
the definition and recognition of a common end 



254 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

which will establish a standard for the trial of 
every conceivable issue, to which, that is, every 
other issue can be subordinated ; and what common 
end can there be in all the world except this idea 
of the world kingdom of God? What is the good 
of orienting one's devotion to a firm, or to class 
solidarity, or La Repiiblique Frangaise, or Poland, 
or Albania, or such love and loyalty as people pro- 
fess for King George or King Albert or the Due 
d'Orleans — it puzzles me why — or any such in- 
termediate object of self-abandonment? We need 
a standard so universal that the platelayer may say 
to the barrister or the duchess, or the Red Indian 
to the Limehoiise sailor, or the Anzac soldier to the 
Sinn Feiner or the Chinaman, " W^hat are w^e two 
doing for it? " And to fill the place of that " it," 
no other idea is great enough or commanding 
enough, but only the world kingdom of God. 

However long he may have to hunt, the blind 
man who is seeking service and an end to bicker- 
ings will come to that at last, because of all the 
thousand other things he may clutch at, nothing 
else can satisfy his manifest need. 



yi 

THE ENDING OF THE WAR 



About the end of the war there are two chief ways 
of thinking: there is a simpler sort of mind which 
desires merely a date, and a more complex kind 
which wants particulars. To the former class be- 
long the most of the men out at the front. They 
are so bored by this war that they would welcome 
any peace that did not definitely admit defeat — 
and examine the particulars later. The " tone " of 
the German army, to judge by its captured letters, 
is even lower. It would welcome peace in any 
form. Never in the whole history of the world has 
a war been so universally unpopular as this war. 

The mind of the soldier is obsessed by a vision of 
home-coming for good, so vivid and alluring that 
it blots out nearly every other consideration. The 
visions of people at home are of plenty instead of 
privation, lights up, and the cessation of a hundred 
tiresome restrictions. And it is natural therefore 
that a writer rather given to guesses and forecasts 

255 



256 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

should be asked very frequently to guess how long 
the war has still to run. 

All such forecasting is the very wildest of shoot- 
ing. There are the chances of war to put one out, 
and of a war that changes far faster than the mili- 
tary intelligence. I have made various forecasts. 
At the outset I thought that military Germany 
would fight at about the 1899 level, would be lavish 
with cavalry and great attacks, that it would be re- 
luctant to entrench, and that the French and Brit- 
ish had learnt the lesson of the Boer War better 
than the Germans. I trusted to the melodramatic 
instinct of the Kaiser. I trusted to the quickened 
intelligence of the British military caste. The first 
rush seemed to bear me out, and I opened my paper 
day by day expecting to read of the British and 
French entrenched and the Germans beating them- 
selves to death against wire and trenches. In those 
days I wrote of the French being over the Rhine 
before 1915. But it was the Germans who en- 
trenched first. 

Since then I have made some other attempts. I 
did not prophesy at all in 1915, so far as I can re- 
member. If I had I should certainly have backed 
the Gallipoli attempt to win. It was the right thing 
to do, and it was done abominably. It should have 
given us Constantinople and brought Bulgaria to 
our side ; it gave us a tragic history of administra- 



THE ENDING OF THE WAR 257 

tive indolence and negligence, and wasted bravery 
and devotion. I was very hopeful of the western 
offensive in 1915 ; and in 1916 I counted still on our 
continuing push. I believe we were very near 
something like decision this last September, but 
some archaic dream of doing it with cavalry dashed 
these hopes. The " Tanks " arrived too late to do 
their proper work, and their method of use is being 
worked out very slowly. ... I still believe in the 
western push, if only we push it for all we are 
worth. If only we push it with our brains, with 
our available and still unorganised brains; if only 
we realise that the art of modem war is to invent 
and invent and invent. Hitherto I have always 
hoped and looked for decision, a complete victory 
that would enable the Allies to dictate peace. But 
such an expectation is largely conditioned by these 
delicate questions of adaptability that my tour of 
the front has made very urgent in my mind. A 
spiteful German American writer has said that 
the British would rather kill twenty thousand of 
their men than break one general. Even a gain of 
truth in such a remark is a very valid reason for 
lengthening one's estimate of the duration of the 
war. 

There can be no doubt that the Western allies 
are playing a winning game upon the western front, 
and that this is the front of decision now. It is not 



258 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

in doubt that they are beating the Germans and 
shoving them back. The uncertain factor is the 
rate at which they are shoving them back. If they 
can presently get to so rapid an advance as to 
bring the average rate since July 1st up to two or 
three miles a day, then we shall still see the Allies 
dictating tenns. But if the shove drags on at its 
present pace of less than a mile and four thousand 
prisoners a week over the limited Somme front only, 
if nothing is attempted elsewhere to increase the 
area of pressure,* then the intolerable stress and 
boredom of the war will bring about a peace long 
before the Germans are decisively crushed. But 
the war, universally detested, may go on into 1918 
or 1919. Food riots, famine, and general disorgan- 
isation will come before 1920, if it does. The Al- 
lies have a winning game before them, but they 
seem unable to discover and promote the military 
genius needed to harvest an unquestionable victory. 
In the long run this may not be an unmixed evil. 
Victory, complete and dramatic, may be bought too 
dearly. We need not triumphs out of this war but 
the peace of the world. 

This war is altogether unlike any previous war, 
and its « ending, like its development, will follow 
a course of its own. For a time people's minds 

* This was written originally before the French offensive at 
Verdun. 



THE ENDI:NG of the war 259 

ran into the old grooves, the Germans were going 
nach Paris and nach London; Lord Curzon filled 
our minds with a pleasant image of the Bombay 
Lancers riding down Unter den Linden. But the 
Versailles precedent of a council of victors dictat- 
ing terms to the vanquished is not now so evidently 
in men's minds. The utmost the Allies talk upon 
now is to say, " We must end the war on German 
soil." The Germans talk frankly of " holding out." 
I have guessed that the western offensive will be 
chiefly on German soil by neS:t June; it is a mere 
guess, and I admit it is quite conceivable that the 
" push " may still be grinding out its daily tale of 
wounded and prisoners in 1918 far from that goal. 

None of the combatants expected such a war as 
this, and the consequences is that the world at 
large has no idea how to get out of it. The war 
may stay with us like a schoolboy caller, because 
it does not know how to go. The Italians said as 
much to me. " Suppose we get to Innsbruck and 
Labich and Trieste," they said, " it isn't an end ! " 
Lord Northcliffe, I am told, came away from Italy 
with the conviction that the war would last six 
years. 

There is the clearest evidence that nearly every 
one is anxious to get out of the war now. Nobody 
at all, except perhaps a few people who may be 
called to account and a handful of greedy profit- 



260 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

seekers, wants to keep it going. Quietly perhaps 
and unobtrusively, every one I know is now trying 
to find the way out of the war, and I am convinced 
that the same is the case in Germany. That is 
what makes the Peace-at-any-price campaign so ex- 
asperating. It is like being chased by clamorous 
geese across a common in the direction in which you 
want to go. But how are we to get out — with 
any credit — in such a way as to prevent a subse- 
quent collapse into another war as frightful? 

At present three programmes are before the world 
of the way in which the war can be ended. The 
first of these assumes a complete predominance of 
our Allies. It has been stated in general terms 
by Mr. Asquith. Evacuation, reparation, due pun- 
ishment of those responsible for the war, and 
guarantees that nothing of the sort shall happen 
again. There is as yet no mention of the nature of 
these guarantees. Just exactly what is to happen 
to Poland, Austria, and the Turkish Empire does 
not appear in this prospectus. The German Chan- 
cellor is equally elusive. The Kaiser has stampeded 
the peace-at-any-price people of Great Britain by 
solemnly proclaiming that Germany wants peace. 
We knew that. But what sort of peace? It would 
seem that we are promised vaguely evacuation and 
reparation on the western frontier, and in addition 
there are to be guarantees — but it is quite evident 



THE E:NDING of the war 261 

they are altogether different guarantees from Mr. 
Asquith's — that nothing of the sort is ever to 
happen again. The programme of the British and 
their Allies seems to contemplate something like a 
forcible disarmament of Germany; the programme 
of Germany hints at least at a disarmament and 
military occupation of Belgium, the desertion of 
Serbia and Russia, and the surrender to Germany 
of every facility for a later and more successful 
German offensive in the west. But it is clear that 
on these terms as stated the war must go on to the 
definite defeat of one side or the other or a Eu- 
ropean chaos. They are irreconcilable sets of 
terms. 

Yet it Is hard to say how they can be modified 
on either side, if the war is to be decided only be- 
tween the belligerents and by standards of national 
interest only, without reference to any other con- 
siderations. Our Allies would be insane to leave 
the Hohenzollern at the end of the war with a knife 
in his hand, after the display he has made of his 
quality. To surrender his knife means for the 
Hohenzollern the abandonment of his dreams, the 
repudiation of the entire education and training 
of Germany for half a century. When we realise 
the fatality of this antagonism, we realise how it is 
that, in this present anticipation of hell, the weary, 
wasted and tormented nations must still sustain 



262 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

their monstrous dreary struggle. And that is why 
this thought that possibly there may be a side way 
out, a sort of turning over of the present endlessly 
hopeless game into a new and different and man- 
ageable game through the introduction of some ex- 
ternal factor, creeps and spreads as I find it creep- 
ing and spreading. 

That is what the finer intelligences of America 
are beginning to realise, and why men in Europe 
continually turn their eyes to America, with a sur- 
mise, with a doubt. 

A point of departure for very much thinking in 
this matter is the recent conversation of speeches 
between President Wilson and Viscount Grey. All 
Europe was impressed by the truth and by Presi- 
dent Wilson's recognition of the truth that from 
any other great war after this, America will be un- 
able to abstain. Can America come into this dis- 
pute at the end to insist upon something better than 
a new diplomatic patchwork, and so obviate the 
later completer Armageddon? Is there, above the 
claims and passions of Germany, France, Britain, 
and the rest of them, a conceivable right thing to 
do for all mankind? That it might also be in the 
interest of America to support? Is there a Third 
Party solution, so to speak, which may possibly be 
the way out from this war? 



THE ENDING OF THE WAR 263 

§ 2 

Let me sketch out here what I conceive to be the 
essentials of a world settlement. Some of the 
items are the mere commonplaces of every one who 
discusses this question ; some are less frequently in- 
sisted upon. I have been joining up one thing to 
another, suggestions I have heard from this man 
and that, and I believe that it is really possible to 
state a solution that will be acceptable to the bulk 
of reasonable men all about the world. Directly 
we put the panic-massacres of Dinant and Louvain, 
the crime of the Lusitania and so on into the cate- 
gory of symptoms rather than essentials, outrages 
that call for special punishments and reparations, 
but that do not enter further into the ultimate 
settlement, we can begin to conceive a possible 
world treaty. Let me state the broad outlines of 
this pacification. The outlines depend one upon 
the other; each is a condition of the other. It is 
upon these lines that the thoughtful as dis- 
tinguished from the merely combative people, seem 
to be drifting everywhere. 

In the first place, it is agreed that there would 
have to be an identical treaty between all the 
great powers of the world binding them to cer- 
tain things. It would have to provide: 

That the few great industrial states capable of 



264 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

producing modern war equipment should take over 
and control completely the manufacture of all 
munitions of war in the world. And that they 
should absolutely close the supply of such ma- 
terial to all the other states in the world. This is 
a far easier task than many people suppose. War 
has now been so developed on its mechanical side 
that the question of its continuance or abolition 
rests now entirely upon four or five great powers. 

Next comes the League of Peace idea ; that there 
should be an International Tribunal for the dis- 
cussion and settlement of international disputes. 
That the dominating powers should maintain land 
and sea forces only up to a limit agreed upon and 
for internal police use only or for the purpose of 
enforcing the decisions of the Tribunal. That they 
should all be bound to attack and suppress any 
power amongst them which increases its war equip- 
ment beyond its defined limits. 

That much has already been broached in several 
quarters. But so far is not enough. It ignores 
the chief processes of that economic war that aids 
and abets and is inseparably a part of modern in- 
ternational conflicts. If we are to go as far as we 
have already stated in the matter of international 
controls, then we must go further and provide that 
the International Tribunal should have power to 
consider and set aside all tariffs and localised privi- 



THE ENDING OF THE WAR 265 

leges that seem grossly unfair or seriously irritat- 
ing between the various states of the world. It 
should have power to pass or revise all new tariff, 
quarantine, alien exclusion, or the like legisla- 
tion affecting international relations. Moreover, 
it should take over and extend the work of the In- 
ternational Bureau of Agriculture at Rome with a 
view to the control of all staple products. It should 
administer the sea law of the world, and control 
and standardise freights in the common interests 
of mankind. Without these provisions it would be 
merely preventing the use of certain weapons; it 
would be doing nothing to prevent countries stran- 
gling or suffocating each other by commercial war- 
fare. It would not abolish war. 

Now upon this issue people do not seem to me 
to be yet thinking very clearly. It is the exception 
to find any one among the peace talkers who really 
grasps how inseparably the necessity for free ac- 
cess for every one to natural products, to coal and 
tropical products e.g., free shipping at non-dis- 
criminating tariffs, and the recognition by a Tri- 
bunal of the principle of common welfare in trade 
matters, is bound up with the ideal of a permanent 
world peace. But any peace that does not provide 
for these things will be merely the laying down of 
the sword in order to take up the cudgel. And a 
"peace" that did not rehabilitate industrial Bel- 



266 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

gium, Poland, and the north of France, would call 
imperatively for the imposition upon the Allies of a 
system of tariffs in the interests of these countries, 
and for a bitter economic " war after the war " 
against Germany. That restoration is of course an 
implicit condition to any attempt to set up an eco- 
nomic peace in the world. 

These things being arranged for the future, it 
would be further necessary to set up an interna- 
tional boundary commission, subject to certain de- 
fining conditions agreed upon by the belligerents, 
to redraw the map of Europe, Asia, and Africa. 
This war does afford an occasion such as the world 
may never have again of tracing out the " natural 
map " of mankind, the map that will secure the 
maximum of homogeneity and the minimum of 
racial and economic freedom. All idealistic people 
hope for a restored Poland. But it is a childish 
thing to dream of a contented Poland with Posen 
still under the Prussian heel, with Cracow cut off 
and without a Baltic port. These claims of Poland 
to completeness have a higher sanction than the 
mere give and take of belligerents in congress. 

Moreover this International Tribunal, if it was 
indeed to prevent war, would need also to have 
power to intervene in the affairs of any country or 
region in a state of open and manifest disorder, for 
the protection of foreign travellers and of persons 



THE ENDING OF THE WAR 267 

and interests localised in that country but foreign 
to it. 

Such an agreement as I have here sketched out 
would at once lift international politics out of the 
bloody and hopeless squalor of the present conflict. 
It is, I venture to assert, the peace of the reasonable 
man in any country whatever. But it needs the 
attention of such a disengaged people as the Ameri- 
can people to work it out and supply it with — 
weight. It needs putting before the world with 
some sort of authority greater than its mere entire 
reasonableness. Otherwise it will not come before 
the minds of ordinary men with the effect of a 
practicable proposition. I do not see any such 
plant springing from the European battlefields. It 
is America's supreme opportunity. And yet it is 
the common sense of the situation, and the solu- 
tion that must satisfy a rational German as com- 
pletely as a rational Frenchman or Englishman. 
It has nothing against it but the prejudice against 
new and entirely novel things. 



In throwing out the suggestion that America 
should ultimately undertake the responsibility of 
proposing a world peace settlement, I admit that 
I run counter to a great deal of European feeling. 



268 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

Nowhere in Europe now do people seem to be 
in love with the United States. But feeling is a 
colour that passes. And the question is above mat- 
ters of feeling. Whether the belligerents dislike 
Americans or the Americans dislike the belligerents 
is an incidental matter. The main question is of 
the duty of a great and fortunate nation towards the 
rest of the world and the future of mankind. 

I do not know how far Americans are aware of 
the trend of feeling in Europe at the present time. 
Both France and Great Britain have a sense of 
righteousness in this war such as no nation, no 
people, has ever felt in war before. We know we 
are fighting to save all the world from the rule of 
force and the unquestioned supremacy of the mili- 
tary idea. Few Frenchmen or Englishmen can 
imagine the war presenting itself to an American 
intelligence under any other guise. At the inva- 
sion of Belgium we were astonished that America 
did nothing. At the sinking of the Lusitania all 
Europe looked to America. The British mind con- 
templates the spectacle of American destroyers act- 
ing as bottleholders to German submarines with a 
dazzled astonishment. " Manila," we gasp. In 
England we find excuses for America in our own 
past. In '66 we betrayed Denmark; in '70 we de- 
serted France. The French have not these memo- 
ries. They do not understand the damning tempta- 



THE ENDING OF THE WAR 269 

tions of those who feel they are ^' au-dessus de la 
melee.'' They believe they had some share in the 
independence of America, that there is a sacred 
cause in republicanism, that there are grounds for 
a peculiar sympathy between France and the United 
States in republican institutions. They do not 
realise that Germany and America have a common 
experience in recent industrial development, and 
a common belief in the " degeneracy " of all nations 
with a lower rate of trade expansion. They do not 
realise how a political campaign with the slogan 
of " Peace and a Full Dinner-Pail " looks in the 
Middle West, what an honest, simple, rational ap- 
peal it makes there. Atmospheres alter values. In 
Europe, strung up to tragic and majestic issues, 
to Europe gripping a gigantic evil in a death strug- 
gle, that would seem an inscription worthy of a 
pigstye. A child in Europe would know now that 
the context is, " until the bacon-buyer calls," and 
it is difficult to realise that adult citizens in Amer- 
ica may be incapable of realising that obvious con- 
text. 

I set these things down plainly. There is a very 
strong disposition in all the European countries to 
believe America fundamentally indifferent to the 
rights and wrongs of the European struggle; sen- 
timentally interested perhaps, but fundamentally 
indifferent. President Wilson is regarded as a 



270 ITALY, FEANCE AND BRITAIN 

mere academic sentimentalist by a great number of 
Europeans. There is a very widespread disposition 
to treat America lightly and contemptuously, to 
believe that America, as one man put it to me re- 
cently, " hasn't the heart to do anything great or the 
guts to do anything wicked." There is a strong 
undercurrent of hostility therefore to the idea of 
America having any voice whatever in the final 
settlement after the war. It is not for a British 
writer to analyse the appearances that have thus 
affected American world prestige. I am telling 
what I have observed. 

Let me relate two trivial anecdotes. 

X. came to my hotel in Paris one day to take me 
to see a certain munitions organisation. He took 
from his pocket a picture postcard that had been 
sent him by a well-meaning American acquaintance 
from America. It bore a portrait of General 
Lafayette, and under it was printed the words, 
" General Lafayette, Colonel in the United States 
army.'' 

" Oh ! these Americans ! " said X. with a gesture. 

And as I returned to Paris from the French front, 
our train stopped at some intermediate station 
alongside of another train of wounded men. Ex- 
actly opposite our compartment was a car. It ar- 
rested our conversation. It was, as it were, an 
ambulance de grand luxe; it was a thing of very 



THE ENDING OF THE WAR 271 

light, bright wood and very golden decorations; at 
one end of it was painted very large and fair the 
Stars and Stripes, and at the other fair-sized letters 
of gold proclaimed — I am sure the lady will not 
resent this added gleam of publicity — " Presented 
by Mrs. William Vanderbilt." 

My companions were French writers and French 
military men, and they were discussing with very 
keen interest that persistent question, " the ideal 
battery." But that ambulance sent a shaft of light 
into our carriage, and we stared together. 

Then Colonel Z. pointed with two fingers and 
remarked to us, without any excess of admiration : 

'^ America! '' 

Then he shrugged his shoulders and pulled down 
the corners of his mouth. 

We felt there was nothing more to add to that, 
and after a litle pause the previous question was 
resumed. 

I state these things in order to make it clear that 
America will start at a disadvantage when she 
starts upon the mission of salvage and reconcilia- 
tion which is, I believe, her proper role in this 
world conflict. One would have to be blind and 
deaf on this side to be ignorant of European per- 
suasion of America's triviality. I would not like to 
be an American travelling in Europe now, and those 
I meet here and there have some of the air of men 



272 ITALY, FEANCE AND BKITAIN 

who at any moment may be dunned for a debt. 
They explode without provocation into excuses and 
expostulations. 

And I will further confess that when Viscount 
Grey answered the intimations of President Wilson 
and ex-President Taft of an American initiative to 
found a World League for Peace, by asking if Amer- 
ica was prepared to back that idea with force, he 
spoke the doubts of all thoughtful European men. 
No one but an American deeply versed in the 
idiosyncrasies of the American population can an- 
swer that question, or tell us how far the delusion of 
world isolation which has prevailed in America for 
several generations has been dispelled. But if the 
answer to Lord Grey is " Yes," then I think history 
will emerge with a complete justification of the ob- 
stinate maintenance of neutrality by America. It 
is the end that reveals a motive. It is our ultimate 
act that sometimes teaches us our original inten- 
tion. No one can judge the United States yet. 
Were you neutral because you are too mean and 
cowardly, or too stupidly selfish, or because you had 
in view an end too great to be sacrificed to a mo- 
ment of indignant pride and a force in reserve too 
precious to dispel? That is the still open question 
for America. 

Every country is a mixture of many strands. 
There is a Base America, there is a Dull America, 



THE ENDING OF THE WAR 273 

there is an Ideal and Heroic America. And I am 
convinced that at present Europe underrates and 
misjudges the possibilities of the latter. 

All about the world to-day goes a certain free- 
masonry of thought. It is an impalpable and 
hardly conscious union of intention. It thinks not 
in terms of national but human experience; it falls 
into directions and channels of thinking that lead 
inevitably to the idea of a world-state under the 
rule of one righteousness. In no part of the world 
is this modern type of mind so abundantly de- 
veloped, less impeded by antiquated and perverse 
political and religious forms, and nearer the sources 
of political and administrative power, than in 
America. It does not seem to matter what thou- 
sand other things America may happen to be, see- 
ing that it is also that. And so, just as I cling to 
the belief, in spite of hundreds of adverse phenom- 
ena, that the religious and social stir of these times 
must ultimately go far to unify mankind under the 
kingship of God, so do I cling also to the persuasion 
that there are intellectual forces among the rational 
elements in the belligerent centres, among the other 
neutrals and in America, that will co-operate in 
enabling the United States to play that role of the 
Unimpassioned Third Party, which becomes more 
and more necessary to a generally satisfactory end- 
ing of the war. 



274 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 



The idea that the settlement of this war must be 
what one might call an unimpassioned settlement 
or, if you will, a scientific settlement or a judicial 
and not a treaty settlement, a settlement, that is, 
based upon some conception of what is right and 
necessary rather than upon the relative success or 
failure of either set of belligerents to make its Will 
the standard of decision, is one that, in a great 
variety of forms and partial developments, I find 
gaining ground in the most different circles. The 
war was an adventure, it was the German adven- 
ture under the Hohenzollern tradition, to dominate 
the world. It was to be the last of the Conquests. 
It has failed. Without calling upon the reserve 
strength of America the civilised world has de- 
feated it, and the war continues now partly upon 
the issue whether that adventure shall ever be re- 
peated or whether it shall be made forever impos- 
sible, and partly because Germany has no organ 
but its Hohenzollern organisation through which it 
can admit its failure and develop its latent readi- 
ness for a new understanding on lines of mutual 
toleration. For that purpose nothing more re- 
luctant could be devised than Hohenzollern im- 
perialism. But the attention of every combatant 
— it is not only Germany now — has been concen- 



THE ENDING OF THE WAR 275 

trated upon military necessities; every nation is a 
clenched nation, with its powers of action centred 
in its own administration, bound by many strategic 
threats and declarations, and dominated by the idea 
of getting and securing advantages. It is inevi- 
table that a settlement made in a conference of bel- 
ligerents alone will be short-sighted, harsh, limited 
by merely incidental necessities, and obsessed by 
the idea of hostilities and rivalries continuing 
perennially; it will be a trading of advantages for 
subsequent attacks. It will be a settlement alto- 
gether different in effect as well as in spirit from 
a world settlement made primarily to establish a 
new phase in the history of mankind. 

Let me take three instances of the impossibility 
of complete victory on either side giving a solution 
satisfactory to the conscience and intelligence of 
reasonable men. 

The first — on which I will not expatiate, for 
every one knows of its peculiar difficulty — is Po- 
land. 

The second is a little one, but one that has taken 
hold of my imagination. In the settlement of 
boundaries preceding this war the boundary be- 
tween Serbia and north-eastern Albania w^as drawn 
with an extraordinary disregard of the elementary 
needs of the Albanians of that region. It ran along 
the foot of the mountains which form their summer 



276 ITALY, FKANCE AND BRITAIN 

pastures and their refuge from attack, and it cut 
their mountains off from their winter pastures and 
market towns. Their whole economic life was cut 
to pieces and existence rendered intolerable for 
them. Now an intelligent third party settling Eu- 
rope would certainly restore these market towns, 
Ipek, Jakova, and Prisrend, to Albania. But the 
Albanians have no standing in this war; theirs is 
the happy lot that might have fallen to Belgium 
had she not resisted; the war goes to and fro 
through Albania; and when the settlement comes, 
more particularly if it is a settlement with the 
allies of Serbia in the ascendant, it is highly im- 
probable that the slightest notice will be taken of 
Albania's plight in this region. In which case these 
particular Albanians will either be driven into exile 
to America or they will be goaded to revolt, which 
will be followed no doubt by the punitive procedure 
usual in the Balkan peninsula. 

For my third instance I would step from a mat- 
ter as small as three market towns and the grazing 
of a few thousand head of sheep to a matter as big 
as the world. What is going to happen to the 
shipping of the world after this war? The Ger- 
mans, with that combination of cunning and stu- 
pidity which baflSes the rest of mankind, have set 
themselves to destroy the mercantile marine not 



THE ENDING OF THE WAR 277 

merely of Britain and France but of Norway and 
Sweden, Holland, and all the neutral countries. 
The German papers openly boast that they are 
building a big mercantile marine that will start out 
to take up the world's overseas trade directly peace 
is declared. Eveiy such boast receives careful at- 
tention in the British press. We have heard a very 
great deal about the German will-to-power in this 
war, but there is something very much older and 
tougher and less blatant and conspicuous, the Brit- 
ish will. In the British papers there has appeared 
and gained a permanent footing this phrase, " ton 
for ton." This means that Britain will go on fight- 
ing until she has exacted and taken over from Ger- 
many the exact equivalent of all the British ship- 
ping Germany has submarined. People do not real- 
ise that a time may come when Germany will be 
glad and eager to give Russia, France and Italy all 
that they require of her, when Great Britain may be 
quite content to let her allies make an advantage- 
ous peace and herself still go on fighting Germany. 
She does not intend to let that furtively created 
German mercantile marine ship or coal or exist 
upon the high seas — so long as it can be used as 
an economic weapon against her. Neither Britain 
nor France nor Italy can tolerate anything of the 
sort. 



278 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 



It has been the peculiar boast of Great Britain 
that her shipping has been unpatriotic. She has 
been the impartial carrier of the whole world. Her 
shippers may have served their own profit; they 
have never served hers. The fluctuations of freight 
charges may have been a universal nuisance, but 
they have certainly not been an aggressive national 
conspiracy. It is Britain's case against any Ger- 
man ascendancy at sea, an entirely convincing case, 
that such an ascendancy would be used ruthlessly 
for the advancement of German world power. The 
long-standing freedom of the seas vanishes at the 
German touch. So beyond the present war there 
opens the agreeable prospect of a mercantile strug- 
gle, a bitter freight war and a war of Navigation 
Acts for the ultimate control in the interests ol 
Germany or of the Anti-German allies, of the 
world's trade. 

Now how in any of these three cases can the bar- 
gaining and trickery of diplomatists and the ad- 
vantage-hunting of the belligerents produce any 
stable and generally beneficial solution? What all 
the neutrals want, what every rational and far- 
sighted man in the belligerent countries wants, 
what the common sense of the whole world de- 
mands, is neither the " ascendancy " of Germany 
nor the " ascendancy " of Great Britain nor the 
" ascendancy " of any state or people or interest 



THE ENDING OF THE WAR 279 

in the shipping of the world. The plain right thing 
is a world shipping control, as impartial as the 
Postal Union. What right and reason and the wel- 
fare of coming generations demand in Poland is a 
unified and autonomous Poland, with Cracow, 
Danzig, and Posen brought into the same Polish- 
speaking ring-fence with Warsaw. What every 
one who has looked into the Albanian question de- 
sires is that the Albanians shall pasture their flocks 
and market their sheepskins in peace, free of Serb- 
ian control. In every country at present at war, 
the desire of the majority of people is for a non-con- 
tentious solution that will neither crystallise a 
triumph nor propitiate an enemy, but which will 
embody the economic and ethnological and geo- 
graphical common sense of the matter. But while 
the formulae of national belligerence are easy, 
familiar, blatant, and insistently present, the gen- 
tler, greater formulae of that wider and newer 
world pacificism has still to be generally under- 
stood. It is so much easier to hate and suspect 
than negotiate generously and patiently; it is so 
much harder to think than to let go in a shrill 
storm of hostility. The national pacifist is ham- 
pered not only by belligerency but by a sort of 
malignant extreme pacificism as impatient and silly 
as the extremest patriotism. 



280 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

§ 5 

I sketch out these ideas of a world pacification 
from a third party standpoint, because I find them 
crystallising out in men's minds. I note how men 
discuss the suggestion that America may play a 
large part in such a permanent world pacification. 
There I end my account rendered. These things 
are as much a part of my impression of the war 
as a shell burst on the Carso or the yellow trenches 
at Martinpuich. But I do not know how opinion 
is going in America, and I am quite unable to esti- 
mate the power of these new ideas I set down, rela- 
tive to the blind forces of instinct and tradition that 
move the mass of mankind. On the whole I be- 
lieve more in the reason-guided will-power of men 
than I did in the early half of 1914. If I am doubt- 
ful whether after all this war will " end war," I 
think on the other hand it has had such an effect of 
demonstration, that it may start a process of 
thought and conviction, it may sow the world with 
organisations and educational movements, consid- 
erable enough to grapple with and either arrest or 
prevent the next great war catastrophe. I am by 
no means sure even now that this is not the last 
great war in the experience of men. I still believe 
it may be. 

The most dangerous thing in the business so far 
as the future is concerned is the wide disregard 



THE ENDING OF THE WAR 281 

of the fact that national economic fighting is bound 
to cause war, and the almost universal ignorance 
of the necessity of subjecting shipping and over- 
seas and international trade to some kind of in- 
ternational control. These two things, restraint 
of trade and advantage of shipping, are the chief 
material causes of anger between modern states. 
But they would not be in themselves dangerous 
things if it were not for the exaggerated delusions 
of kind and difference and the crack-brained " loy- 
alties " arising out of these that seem still to rule 
men's minds. Years ago I came to the conviction 
that much of the evil in human life was due to the 
inherent vicious disposition of the human mind to 
intensify classification.* I do not know how it will 
strike the reader, but to me this war, this slaughter 
of eight or nine million people, is due almost en- 
tirely to this little, almost universal lack of a clear- 
headedness; I believe that the share of wickedness 
in making war is quite secondary to the share of 
this universal shallow silliness of outlook. These 
effigies of emperors and kings and statesmen that 
lead men into war, these legends of nationality and 
glory, would collapse before our universal derision, 
if they were not stuffed tight and full with the un- 
thinking folly of the common man. 

* See my " First and Last Things," Bk. I, and my " A Modem 
Utopia," Ch. X. 



282 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

There is in us all, an indolent capacity for suf- 
fering evil and dangerous things that I contemplate 
each year of my life with a deepening incredulity. 
I perceive we suffer them; I record the futile pro- 
tests of the intelligence. It seems to me incredible 
that men should not rise up out of this muddy, 
bloody, wasteful mess of a world war, with a resolu- 
tion to end forever the shams, the prejudices, the 
pretences and habits that have impoverished their 
lives, slaughtered our sons, and wasted the world, a 
resolution so powerful and sustained that nothing 
could withstand it. 

But it is not apparent that any such will arises. 
Does it appear at all? I find it hard to answer 
that question because my own answer varies with 
my mood. There are moods when it seems to me 
that nothing of the sort is happening. This war 
has written its warning in letters of blood and flame 
and anguish in the skies of mankind for two years 
and a half. When I look for the collective response 
to that warning, I see a multitude of little chaps 
crawling about their private ends like mites in an 
old cheese. The kings are still in their places, not 
a royal prince has been killed in this otherwise uni- 
versal slaughter ; when the fatuous portraits of the 
monarchs flash upon the screen the widows and 
orphans still break into loyal song. The ten thou- 



THE ENDING OF THE WAR 283 

sand religions of mankind are still ten thousand 
religions, all busy at keeping men apart and hostile. 
I see scarcely a measurable step made anywhere 
towards that world kingdom of God, which is, I 
assert, the manifest solution, the only formula that 
can bring peace to all mankind. Mankind as a 
whole seems to have learnt nothing and forgotten 
nothing in thirty months of war. 

And then on the other hand I am aware of much 
quiet talking. This book tells of how I set out to 
see the war, and it is largely conversation. . . . 
Perhaps men have always expected miracles to 
happen; if one had always lived in the night and 
only heard tell of the day, I suppose one would 
have expected dawn to come as a vivid flash of light. 
I suppose one would still think it was night long 
after the things about one had crept out of the 
darkness into visibility. In comparison with all 
previous wars there has been much more thinking 
and much more discussion. If most of the talk 
seems to be futile, if it seems as if every one were 
talking and nobody doing, it does not follow that 
things are not quietly slipping and sliding out of 
their old adjustments amidst the babble and be- 
cause of the babble. Multitudes of men must be 
struggling with new ideas. It is reasonable to 
argue that there must be reconsideration, there 



284 ITALY, FRANCE AND BRITAIN 

must be time, before these millions of mental ef- 
forts can develop into a new collective purpose and 
really show — in consequences. 

But that they will do so is my hope always and 
on the whole, except in moods of depression and im- 
patience, my belief. When one has travelled to a 
conviction so great as mine it is difficult to doubt 
that other men faced by the same universal facts 
will not come to the same conclusion. I believe 
that only through a complete simplification of re- 
ligion to its fundamental idea, to a world-wide real- 
isation of God as the king of the heart and of all 
mankind, setting aside monarchy and national ego- 
tism altogether, can mankind come to any certain 
happiness and security. The precedent of Islam 
helps my faith in the creative inspiration of such 
a renascence of religion. The Sikh, the Moslem, 
the Puritan have shown that men can fight better 
for a Divine Idea than for any flag or monarch in 
the world. It seems to me that illusions fade and 
effigies lose credit everywhere. It is a very wonder- 
ful thing to me that China is now a republic. . . . 
I take myself to be very nearly an average man, 
abnormal only by reason of a certain mental rapid- 
ity. I conceive myself to be thinking as the world 
thinks, and if I find no great facts, I find a hundred 
little indications to reassure me that God comes. 
Even those who have neither the imagination nor 



THE ENDING OF THE WAR 285 

the faith to apprehend God as a reality will, I 
think, realise presently that the Kingdom of God 
over a world-wide system of republican states, is 
the only possible formula under which we may hope 
to unify and save mankind. 



THE END 



PBINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMEEIOA 



THE following pages contain advertisements of 
Macmillan books by the same author. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

God The Invisible King 

Ready, May, 1917 

Readers of " Mr. Britling Sees It Through " were par- 
ticularly . impressed with the religious note which it 
sounded especially in its closing pages. The funda- 
mental ideas of God and of the spiritual life of man 
therein set forth were responsible to no inconsiderable 
degree for the tremendous appeal of that story. These 
facts make this volume in which Mr. Wells sets out as 
forcibly and exactly as possible his religious belief, of 
great value. Mr. Wells describes the book himself as 
one written by a man " sympathetic with all sincere re- 
ligious feelings " and yet a man who feels that he must 
protest against those dogmas which have obscured, per- 
verted and prevented the religious Hfe of mankind. The 
spirit of this book, he says, is like that of a missionary, 
who would only too gladly overthrow and smash some 
Polynesian divinity of shark's teeth and painted wood 
and mother-of-pearl. The purpose of the volume like 
the purpose of that missionary is not primarily to shock 
and insult but to liberate — the author is impatient with 
the reverence that stands between man and God. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Mr. Britling Sees It Through 



$i.6o 



" A powerful, strong story. Has wonderful pages 
. . . gems of emotional literature. . . . Nothing could 
express the whole, momentous situation in England and 
in the United States in so few words and such convincing 
tone. . . . For clear thinking and strong feeling, the 
finest picture of the crises in the Anglo-Saxon world that 
has yet been produced." — Philadelphia Public Ledger. 

" Not only Mr. Wells' best book, but the best book so 
far published concerning the war." — Chicago Tribune. 

" The most thoughtfully and carefully worked-out book 
Mr. Wells has given us for many a year. ... A ver- 
itable cross-section of contemporary English life . . . 
admirable, full of color and utterly convincing." — New 
York Times. 

" A war epic. ... To read it is to grasp, as perhaps 
never before, the state of affairs among those to whom 
war is the actual order of the day. Impressive, true, 
tender, . . . infinitely moving and potent." — Chicago 
Tribune. 

" For the first time we have a novel which touches the 
life of the last two years without impertinence. This is 
a really remarkable event, and Mr. Wells' book is a proud 
achievement. . . . The free sincerity of this book, with 
its unfailing distinction of tone, is beautiful ... a crea- 
tion with which we have as yet seen, in this country at 
least, nothing whatever to compare." — London Times. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 

What is Coming? 



Cloth, ismo, $1.50 

This book is a forecast of the consequences of the war. The 
profound psychological changes, the industrial and diplomatic 
developments, the reorganizations in society which are sure to fol- 
low so great an upheaval of the established institutions, are sub- 
jects to which Mr. Wells devotes his deep insight into men's minds 
as well as his prophetic ability. Out of the materials of the past 
and the history-making present, he constructs a brilliant and 
persuasive picture of the future, as sure of touch as his daring, 
imaginative essays, as full of interest as his novels. 

Of special interest are his chapters on the United States, which 
set forth the belief that here in the New World there is being 
moulded a larger understanding of the kinship of nations ; an 
awakening from the great mistake that ideals are geographically 
determined ; that in America there is the foundation of a capacity 
for just estimate, which will ultimately find its way into the 
handling and directing of international affairs. Out of the chaos 
will come a dominant peace alliance, in which the United States 
will take a leading part. 

"Wells speaks with remarkable sureness and conviction, nor 
are his prophetic conclusions, founded on facts, reasonable re- 
search and deep knowledge of human nature, to be doubted. The 
voice of the prophet is well tempered and moderate, and the 
nations discussed will do well to heed." — Chicago Herald. 

" Of widest interest and consequence are Mr. Wells's study and 
discussion of those present international tendencies, nascent needs 
and movements toward friendship out of which will have to grow, 
whose probable growth, indeed, he forecasts, some sort of leaguing 
together of the nations looking toward a greater measure of peace 
than the world has heretofore enjoyed." — New York Times. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



The Research Magnificent 



Cloth, i2mo, $1.50 

A book of real distinction is this novel from the pen of an 
author whose popularity in America is no less than in his native 
England, where he is put in the front ranks of present-day writers. 
The Research Magnificent is pronounced by those critics who have 
read it to be the best work that Mr. Wells has done, realizing 
fully the promises of greatness which not a few have found in its 
immediate predecessors. The author's theme — the research mag- 
nificent — is the story of one man's search for the kingly life. 
A subject such as this is one peculiarly suited to Mr. Wells's 
literary genius, and he has handled it with the skill, the feeling, the 
vision, which it requires. 

" Displays the best in Wells as a thinker, as a critic of man, as 
a student of social and political crises, and — most of all — as a 
novelist." — Boston Transcript. 

"An Extraordinary ... a Wonderful Book." — New Republic. 

" A novel of distinct interest, with a powerful appeal to the 
intellect." — New York Herald. 

" Challenges discussion at a hundred points. It abounds in 
stimulating ideas." — New York Times. 

"A noble, even a consecrated work . . . the crown of his 
career." — New York Globe. 

"A notable novel, perhaps its author's greatest . . . might al- 
most be called an epitome of human existence." — Chicago Herald. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



BEALBY 



With frontispiece. Cloth, i2mo, $1.3$ 
This is the story of the revolt of a little boy who does not 
want to be a steward's helper or a member of the serving class 
but whose heart is set on accomplishing "something big." It 
is told with a delightful sense of the whimsical. The situa- 
tions abound in humor — that peculiarly fascinating humor for 
which Mr. Wells is so famous. Bealby, alias Dick Maltravers, 
who runs away from his troubles only to encounter fresh ones, 
is as wholly charming a character as Mr. Wells has ever cre- 
ated and one whose ever changing fortunes the reader follows 
with unbroken interest. 

" 'Bealby' because of its sprightly style and multitude of inci- 
dents is never wearisome." — Boston Transcript. 

"Such an excursion into the realm of fun as Wells Has not 
made since 'The History of Mr. Pollj^ . . . There are more 
sparkles to the square inch than in any other Wells book." — 
Cincinnati Enquirer. 

"Mr. Wells has written a book as unpolitical as 'Alice in 
Wonderland' and as innocent of economics as of astrology. 
A deliciously amusing comedy of action swift, violent, and 
fantastic." — New York Times. 

"It is Wells on a vacation, a vacation from the war; a vaca- 
tion that will be enjoyed by every one who takes it with him." 
— New York Globe. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.50 

" Easily the best piece of fiction of the book season." 

— Graphic. 

" The book has all the attractive Wells whimsies, 
piquancies, and fertilities of thought, and the story is 
absolutely good to read." — New York World. 

" This time Mr. Wells is very little of a socialist, con- 
siderably of a philosopher, prevailingly humorous, and 
always clever." — The Bellman. 

" A new novel by H. G. Wells is always a treat, and 
' The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman ' will prove no disapr 
pointment. . . . The book in many ways is one of the 
most successful this versatile sociologist has turned out.'' 

— La Follette's Magazine. 

" A novel of unusual excellence told with fine literary 
skill. Mr. Wells has a way of going under the surface 
of things while presenting his incidents and characters." 

— Boston Globe. 

" The book is the most complete and successful of the 
group to which it belongs." — New York Times. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The War in the Air 

IlUistraied, ismo, $1.50 

" It is not every man who can write a story of the improbable 
and make it appear probable, and yet that is what Mr. Wells has 
done in ' The War in the Air.' " — The Outlook. 

"A more entertaining and original story of the future has 
probably never been written." — Town and Country. 

". . . Displays that remarkable ingenuity for which Mr. Wells 
is now famous." — Washington Star. 

" Forcible in the extreme." — Baltimore Sun. 

" It is an exciting tale, a novel military "history." — N. Y. Post 



New Worlds for Old 

'Cloth, i2mo, $1.50 

'Macmillan Standard Library Edition, 50 cents. 

". . . is a readable, straightaway account of Socialism; it is 
singularly informing and all in an undidactic way." — Chicago 
Evening Post. 

" The book impresses us less as a defence of Socialism than as 
a work of art. In a literary sense, Mr. Wells has never done 
anything better." — Argonaut. 

"... a very good introduction to Socialism. It will attract and 
interest those who are not of that faith, and correct those who 
are." — The Dial. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANYj 

Publishers 64-66 Pifth Avenue New York 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proces 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: y-y 2001 

PreservationTechnologie 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATIC 



111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



